Poinciana mental health facility to open next week

After years of delays, an official opening ceremony for the long-awaited Poinciana mental health facility in East End is set to be held next week.

Although no public announcement has been made, the Ministry of Sustainability & Climate Resiliency and Wellness, headed by Dwayne Seymour, has issued invitations to a ‘grand opening’ of the Poinciana Rehabilitation Centre on Tuesday, 10 Dec.

Seymour, in a brief response to queries from the Compass, said the plan was for the facility to begin taking in patients a week after the opening ceremony. The first patients at the facility are expected to be those currently in residential care in Jamaica.

The ministry’s chief officer, Nellie Pouchie, told the Compass that the facility will be fully open from Tuesday.

“The initial patients will be those in Jamaica. Our aim is to have them here before Christmas,” she said.

Without a residential facility, individuals in Cayman with mental health conditions who need long-term treatment and care have had few options. Many have been sent to facilities overseas, mostly to Jamaica, while others have been incarcerated, sometimes for their own safety and the safety of others, at Northward prison. In at least one instance, a detained person has been held at the mental health unit at the George Town Hospital, which is intended for short-term, acute care.

After decades of calls for Cayman to have its own long-term residential facility to cater to individuals with mental health problems and five years after the then Progressives-led government announced plans to build it, construction of the 54-bed centre finally began in October 2019 with a groundbreaking ceremony.

COVID delayed the work, but the site seemed to be substantially complete by summer 2023. Despite several announcements of dates when it was likely to be ready, the facility remained closed, with repeated delays in the site receiving its licence of occupancy.

The delayed opening of the facility was among the several issues over which four government members say they resigned in October.

Among the four was Sabrina Turner, who had been the minister for health and wellness. Upon her resignation, Seymour took over her wellness portfolio and, apparently, responsibility for the completion of the Poinciana facility. Premier Juliana O’Connor-Connolly took over Turner’s health portfolio.

Turner had come under fire for the repeated delays in the opening of Poinciana, which she had said in July this year had been caused by a “plethora of problems”, including mechanical engineering and plumbing inspections, that were outside the remit of her ministry and had been project managed by the Public Works Department.

Speaking at a public meeting last month following her and her three colleagues’ resignations, Turner questioned why the work that enabled the mental health facility to get its occupancy licences appeared to be so quickly completed only after she had stepped aside, and said it was being used as a “political football”.