A new state-of-the-art elevator was officially commissioned into service at the Victoria Jubilee Hospital (VJH) in downtown Kingston yesterday.

Minister of State in the Ministry of Health and Wellness, Juliet Cuthbert-Flynn, who officially commissioned the elevator into service, said that the elevators will assist in boosting the delivery of care at VJH.

“It is going to be of great help to the Victoria Jubilee Hospital. The hospital is the largest women’s hospital in Jamaica. It sees over 7,000 mothers delivering babies on an annual basis so you can imagine the importance of these two [functioning] elevators,”

she noted.

With the installation, the hospital now has two lifts, which will provide for quicker and easier movement between floors for staff, patients and visitors to the public health facility.

“As you can imagine, a pregnant mother trying to climb some stairs once the elevator is out is not something we would want to see happening at our hospitals, and so we are very grateful that we now have two working elevators,”

she added.

The project was undertaken by the National Health Fund (NHF) as part of a $143-million initiative to install eight elevators in hospitals across the South Eastern Regional Health Authority (SERHA).

Cuthbert-Flynn said that the NHF will play a critical role in the servicing of the machinery for approximately two years.