Minister of Health and Wellness, the Hon. Dr. Michael Darville provided an update on the construction of the Freeport Health Campus during the 2026/2027 budget debate in the House of Assembly.
The Minister told Parliamentarians sections of the facility should be open by the second quarter of 2027. He said, “I believe the date of April of next year you’ll begin to see many of the services that currently exist at the Rand Memorial Hospital transferred to that facility as we make way for converting the Rand Memorial Hospital into a geriatric and psychiatric facility with a same day surgery facilities for those two new beautiful theatres that left behind. So I believe by April of next year you’ll see real action.”
The health minister also addressed staffing questions. He said the government is preparing to meet the staffing needs at the new facility. “We are training, trained clinical nurses in Grand Bahama, fifty of them now, to prepare and I think they have one or two more semesters, they will be ready for deployment into the facility. We are training specialty nurses. We are bringing in two new programs at UB that will supplement the midwife program that exists. We will do more emergency training. We have developed our PHA Academy. We are partnering with other colleges to begin to train our workforce.”
Dr. Darville also noted that post graduate training for doctors is also planned. He said, “we’re starting to train doctors in Rwada, We have some of our doctors being trained in South Africa. We’re going into a Memorandum of Understanding with Turkey and we are beginning now to train our health care resources to make sure that the manpower exists and where the manpower is short we’ll have to be able to bring them in from other parts of the world until we catch up with what is necessary to provide these services adequately in the country.”
Ground was broken for the new health campus in May, 2023.
