Horta, Portugal, July 10, 2024 (Lusa) - The Regional Secretary of Health of the Azores announced on Wednesday the government's intention to resize the Hospital do Divino Espírito Santo in Ponta Delgada, which was hit by a fire in May that left it inoperable.
"The central government has taken the political decision to recover the HDES. It's a 27-year-old building, with weaknesses in terms of its physical structure, which is inadequate, but still underutilised," said Mónica Seidi.
Seidi, who was speaking at the Azorean parliament in Horta, Faial, during an urgent debate on health in the region, requested by the Socialist Party, emphasised that they had to "expand the treatment capacity" of the region's largest hospital.
"We want to reorganise the current capacity to resize the Hospital do Divino Espírito Santo and modernise it. We want a renewed, humanised hospital structure, ensuring an environment that prevents illness, speeds up healing and promotes the well-being of users and those who work there. We have a vision. We have a strategy. And we will soon have a functional plan," said Mónica Seidi.
According to the head of health in the Azores, the regional government's plan is based on the renovation of the operating theatre, the reorganisation of outpatient surgery into a robotic room and advanced video surgery, the expansion and remodelling of the emergency service into a modular and adaptable 'open space' and the expansion of the Intensive Care Unit with the construction of an integrated intermediate care unit.
There are also plans to reorganise and expand the multipurpose outpatient department, modernise the wards and update the building's energy efficiency, with a view to making it a self-sustainable Green Hospital.
"The option of repairing the Hospital do Divino Espírito Santo and making it new allows us to save time. And that is important when it comes to providing healthcare to our users," she said.
In her speech, Mónica Seidi announced that the presentation of the modular hospital that will be installed on the perimeter of the Ponta Delgada hospital will be presented to the parties on the 17th, claiming that "the regional government understands that they should have detailed knowledge of the investment to be made".
Still on the subject of the structure, he said that it will comprise a general emergency department (with capacity for 12 beds), two emergency rooms, a paediatric emergency department with six observation beds, an isolation room, two wards (minimum capacity for 80 patients), an imaging service, two operating theatres (with six recovery beds), an intensive and intermediate care unit (with capacity for 12 patients) and a delivery and neonatology unit (up to nine beds for pregnant women).
"All this can be achieved in less time than it would take to build a structure from scratch," she said, adding that the panels for the modular general and paediatric emergency structure (40 modules) and the ward area (55 modules) are already in the vicinity of the HDES.
The modular hospital "will serve as a back-up structure and will make it possible to maintain an increase in capacity when the work to repair, resize and functionally reorganise the current physical structure" of the Hospital do Divino Espírito Santo begins.
She also said that, on Friday, the regional government delivered to the Legislative Assembly the preliminary report with the immediate losses and damage resulting from the fire at the hospital, but decided that, through a resolution, it will propose the preparation of an independent and detailed report on the causes of the fire.
The fire at the Divino Espírito Santo Hospital in Ponta Delgada, on the island of São Miguel, which broke out on 4 May and whose damage is estimated at €24 million, forced the transfer of all patients who were hospitalised to various locations in the Azores, Madeira and the mainland.
ASR/ADB // ADB.
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