Time for Point Lisas Hospital

Annual financial contributions to the proposed hospital by companies, operating at the estate, as well as those of future tenant companies will help both in the meeting of the day-to- day cost of operations as well as any public sector cost

Indeed, the planned hospital should have been a reality as early as the 1960s, even as successive administrations sought to attract international industrial majors to establish plants here which sought to utilise the cheap and readily available gas.

The fact that relatively few accidents have taken place at Point Lisas does not mean that the potential for them was never there. The fact is an immediate and highly skilled professional institution should always have been available. Instead, severely injured victims had to be flown to the United States in air ambulances for required treatment. Victims, who were badly burnt, would have to be taken there because of the absence of a specialist burns treatment facility here. In turn, even where it was feasible, the nearest hospital which offered it, whether the San Fernando General Hospital or the Port of Spain General Hospital or the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, is still several miles away.

Should a major industrial accident take place at Point Lisas, it could become a major logistical problem.

In most, if not all serious cases of industrial accidents, timeliness is of the essence. Even the old Caroni, with not even the remotest possibility of several of its employees requiring major surgery at the same time because of on- the- job accidents had listed clinics among its service areas.

This is not to say that Point Lisas does not have clinics, but these are for relatively minor incidents. The irony of is that we have a First World industrial complex, with investments running into billions of dollars and bringing in billions of dollars troubled by a Third World approach to safety.