Staff members of a rural senior citizen home have stalled the plans of an Ebola Quarantine Centre planned for a senior citizen home which was supposed to have been retrofitted for the purpose of Ebola treatment and quarantine in Barbados.
According to reports, anyone who arrived on the island or was infected with the disease was scheduled for the Centre which would quarantine patients and treat them, but the staffers went to the National Union of Public Workers and now the Ministry of Health is looking at locations closer to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Bridgetown.
The St. Lucy District Hospital near River Bay in the northernmost part of the island in the parish of St. Lucy was scheduled to be the proposed site for the Ebola Centre. This would have necessitated the movement of staff to other facilities across the island but they took up the matter with their Union bosses.
The St Lucy Hospital houses 29 patients, and 15 were to be transferred to the St Philip District Hospital, eight to Gordon Cummins and six to the Geriatric Hospital in the city of Bridgetown.
Matters came to a head when the Ministry of Health’s Permanent Secretary met with the workers last week.
Reports suggested that Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health Tennyson Springer informed the staff during a meeting they as well as the patients were being moved to three district hospitals – the St Philip District Hospital in Ruby; Gordon Cummins Hospital in Rock Hall, St Thomas, and the Geriatric Hospital in Beckles Road, St Michael.
Reports to Caribbean Medical News suggested that the workers were afraid of working alongside student nurses scheduled to arrive on the island from Nigeria but according to Health Minister, the Hon. John Boyce, the nurses’ arrival in Barbados has been “postponed”.
“We are waiting until the situation is more settled”, he said of the arrival of 90 Nigeria hospitality students.
Fifteen local nurses were to have been redeployed at the three institutions abovementioned. That is no longer to be as the Ministry now looks for another location for the Ebola Centre in preparation for any outbreak of the disease in the region.
