Work restarts on mental health facility
(CNS): Work on the much needed and long delayed mental health facility has resumed, after the project was halted by the COVID-19 lockdown in March, officials have said. Government re-started roadworks and gave construction workers the green light to return to sites back in June, and it is not clear why work has only just started on this important public project. It has, however, been plagued with delays for years.
Plans for such a facility go back to 2015, when the outline business case was undertaken. But getting this project off the ground has proved challenging due to a range of issues, from problems with the tendering process to construction companies not wanting to do the job.
Last August three contractors finally signed deals with government to do the work in phases and the groundbreaking took place in October, but it is not clear how much work was actually done during the six months before lockdown.
In a short statement released yesterday, health ministry officials said the facility was still on track to be completed twelve months from now, in September 2021.
Despite the delaying in restarting, Health Minister Dwayne Seymour said the project remains a top priority for the ministry. “In the pandemic mental health has truly come back to centre stage and we have been reminded just how crucial a facility like this here in the Cayman Islands really is,” he added.
However the small residential facility will only go a short way to addressing Cayman’s significant mental health provision gaps. It will accommodate just 54 patients, many of whom will return to the Cayman Islands from overseas facilities, leaving few spaces for those patients here who are treated when needed at the 8-bed unit at the Cayman Islands Hospital, which is well over capacity.
The facility will also not accommodate the criminally insane, even though a number of serving inmates in both HMP Fairbanks, the women’s prison, and HMP Northward, where the men are housed, suffer from serious mental health illnesses that are not being properly managed.
In addition, Cayman has a significant problem of mental health issues among the young, with an increase in reports of suicidal thoughts and major substance abuse problems caused by efforts at self-medication.
Category: Health, Mental Health
our broke government won’t be able to finish this….
You need hundreds of beds. Mental health is out of control on this islands.
I think of 17 cases straight up
We are all entitled to our opinions and freedom of speech, but we all have a responsibility to at least attempt to make constructive contributions to issues in our country, even if it is opposing views. To suggest that a Mental Health Facility is a waste of public funds is inhumane! Mental Health is an illness like ALL illnesses and every Country has citizens that suffer this illness. To suggest that they should not be cared of for is a disgrace and cruel. Perhaps we should just close the Hospitals and stop offering medical services period – all illness is an illness – and a physical illness is no more deserving of treatment than a mental illness. And this is the “God Fearing Christian Society” that we love to say we are?
Please urgently reserve a few rooms for some members of the LA.
Save a room for me! We all going to need to check in by the time this pandemic is over! Staycation me seh!
Keep the borders closed and declare the entire country an insane asylum. If the LA and CMA are anything to go by more that 50% of the population need to be locked up.
What happened to a family support system? Can we not scuttle this boondoggle and let the chips fall where they may?
Amen! Can we not shift the money to schools where children have a little sliver of hope left?
19 rooms already reserved
It has’nt just restarted. I have been working on this project since June and it is well under way.
That’s the news I have heard this month. Get it finished and stop wasting the public purse on bull****.