In a few weeks, Health City Cayman Islands will be presenting plans for its new $100 million hospital project earmarked for Camana Bay, with the hope that shovels will hit the ground in September.
HCCI clinical director Dr. Binoy Chattuparambil said he expects the first phase of the cancer-treatment facility to be up and running at the end of next year.
He said the hospital recognised a need for the specialised services here and he is keen to deliver that to the community.
“These seven years taught us a lot: what the public wants, what are the services that are not available… and what the public expects from us,” he told the Cayman Compass in a recent interview.
State-of-the-art healthcare
Last month, the Central Planning Authority gave HCCI the green light to clear and fill a 3.44-acre plot which will be used for its new medical campus on Minerva Drive – a portion of parcel 13B 230, which is owned by Cayman Shores Development Ltd. The specific design plans for the facility are expected to be submitted to the CPA in a few weeks.
The planned hospital will be 70,000 square feet, with 70 inpatient beds and 250 staff, of which 30% – or 75 positions – will be filled by Caymanians to start.
Chattuparambil said he was proud to be part of a such a project as it will help save local lives and make the Cayman Islands a regional leader in healthcare.
“We are going to have a cancer centre with everything related to the treatment of cancer.
“That treatment will be the medical oncology, chemotherapy, immunotherapy – all CAR-T cell treatment, the radiotherapy treatment,” he said.
CAR-T cell treatment involves the altering of a patient’s immune cells in a laboratory, so that they attack cancer cells in the body.
Chattuparambil added that time is very important in cancer detection and treatment.
When HCCI started in East End, he said there was no full-time cancer specialist on island, with one cancer specialist coming from Jamaica once a month.
“There are a lot of patients who are suffering because of lack of this kind of comprehensive cancer centre on the island. It is affecting the outcomes for these patients because many patients, if you say that you have to go to US for this chemotherapy every week or every month, or if you have to go and stay in the US for three or four months for radiotherapy, many of them are not going,” he said.
The planned Camana Bay medical campus will be the first hospital in the region to offer bone marrow transplantation and CAR-T cell therapy.
Life-saving treatment, lower costs
Chattuparambil said having a centre in Cayman not only will help keep costs down for patients and their families, but also, while undergoing treatment, patients will be closer to home, which makes a difference.
In a February press briefing on the project, he also pointed out that having a medical facility close to George Town and Cayman’s other hospitals, would greatly improve the outcome for any newborn needing medical care. He added that the importance of providing emergency and critical services at the new Camana Bay hospital “cannot be overstated”.
“There have been many instances of lives lost between George Town and a trip to East End – a trip that does not seem far when visiting a friend on a Sunday but when a loved one has had a heart attack, stroke or been involved in life-threatening trauma, seconds and minutes count,” he said at the briefing.
Hospital specs
70,000 square feet
$100 million investment
70 inpatient beds
250 staff30%, or 75 positions, will be Caymanian to start
In Chattuparambil’s recent interview with the Compass, he detailed the benefits of the planned hospital as an emergency facility. “It would be… comparable to the best centres. The emergency care unit will have 10 beds with this advanced emergency care treatment,” he said, adding that there will be equipment that will provide care for heart-attack patients, as well as perform interventional neurology and interventional radiology.
He said the aim is to have “multimodality treatment”.
“We need to have the experts from all these areas, whether it’s a medical side, surgical side, radiotherapy side or immunotherapy side. We want to bring everybody together under one roof and our people should not [be] required to go outside the island for the best treatment available in the world right now. We want to give the best treatment,” he said.
He said the hospital will also have an advanced neonatal care unit in its planned maternity wing that can provide care for mothers and babies.
Chattuparambil said the facility will provide job opportunities in limited areas for Caymanians and he also envisions a variety of options as students get trained in skillsets that will be needed for the hospital.
“Our Healthcare Explorers programme has had over 17,000 educational opportunities completed by the youth so we look forward to the future of having more Caymanians educated and trained in medical fields as their interest level increases,” he said.
Initially, he said, opportunities and interest were in non-technical areas, but that has expanded to such departments as phlebotomy.
Opportunities for education and jobs
“[Caymanians] are now looking at Health City. They know that there are always opportunities there. So they are taking their training in these areas, considering that Health City will have an offer for them,” he said, adding that the initial 30% Caymanian employment could increase to 40% in five years as interest and training grow.
“We are putting the seeds or spark in their minds for various job opportunities in the future,” he said, adding, “so these students should come back to take all these opportunities… That’s the future vision for them.”
Right now, he said, some roles are not accessible because of a lack of expertise, but Caymanians are seeing there is a big opportunity in healthcare.
Chattuparambil pointed to the current generation of students and the experience that Health City offers.
“I’m sure maybe 10% of these students take up [the] opportunity and that’s enough to make it more than 50 or 70% of the employment in the hospital,” he said, adding, “… maybe in 10 years, because these students previously… did not have that dream in their mind, they have not seen what all job opportunities are there for them,” he said.
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