The Minister for Health, Dr Neil Sharma announced today that all six health centres in Suva including Lami and Samabula would be open for extended hours for Colonial War Memorial (CWM) Hospital general outpatients.
This will begin at the end of January 2011.
“At the end of January all health centres around Suva will open. All six health centres will be open for extended hours starting at six in the morning and running till 10 at night,” said Dr Sharma.
This means there will be an overlap of the services at the CWM Hospital for about a month.
“So by the end of February, all services at the general outpatients department will be directed to health centres,” Dr Sharma said.
“Health centres will be able to facilitate general outpatients.
“There are close to 500 patients seen at CWM Hospital on a daily basis and it has a minimum of one support person. We do need to be able to control cross infection, we have facilities in health centres to look after general outpatient type of illnesses.
“We need to develop CWM as a secondary hospital, a base hospital for advanced surgical ward for other specialised work so what we will do is that we’ll close.”
Health centres will open and we hope to develop CWM Hospital a lot more efficiently, Dr Sharma added.
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