No shutdown of operating theatre at EWMSC

There has been no shutdown of any operating theatre at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex (EWMSC), Mt Hope.

Davlin Thomas, CEO of the North Central Regional Health Authority, the umbrella body for the EWMSC, denied a report that a theatre had to be shut down several weeks ago for violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

The report said the theatre was shut down because of a shortage of staff and was poorly maintained.

"No theatre was shut down," he told Newsday yesterday. "In fact we opened a new theatre, the acute care theatre – meaning it is not an emergency, but it is urgent. We facilitate that twice weekly.

"To prepare the theatre we did minor refurbishment on Block 8. The staff came in and did it overnight, so we had a disruption just for about a day."

Thomas said the hospital had increased the number of operating theatres and the number of operations had increased by 2,200 last year, with a target of 9,000 this year.

"We have to commend the staff of those theatres, the doctors, surgeons, nurses...we normally do about 6,000 surgeries, and we did about 8,300 last year.

"We had cataract and hernia surgeries and we had surgery Sundays. By facilitating a lot of the minor surgeries on Sundays, it allowed for more complex surgeries during the week. We completely devastated the hernia waiting list with same-day surgery and we had a backlog of about 1,000."

He said the existing theatres consisted of Block 8, two same-day surgery theatres, and an endoscopy suite.

"We are optimising what we have."