THE NEW Nicosia General Hospital will be up and fully running by the end of June next year, Health Minister Dina Akkelidou said yesterday. It will have cost an estimated £85 million.
Akkelidou was speaking to reporters yesterday morning following a visit to the new hospital’s worksite.
The minister said the government’s position on the handing over of the new hospital remained unchanged and that it expected the contractors to adhere to the agreed completion date, which is at the end of this month. Nevertheless, she said additional “excused delays” had to be taken into account.
She said when the initial timeframe for the project had been mapped out, both the government and Health Ministry had taken into account that there would probably be delays.
Akkelidou said: “We still don’t know what delays the technical committee will approve. Nonetheless, practically speaking, it appears there will be a delay, whether it is deemed excusable or not, which, taking into account the (workers’) August leave, will bring the handing over of the hospital to the end of September, beginning of October this year.”
Although the building’s infrastructure will be completed in the autumn, the hospital is not expected to start functioning until next year. Akkelidou said the bulk of transfer of departments would be completed by March 2005, and by June all procedures to ensure the smooth running of the multi-million pound facility would be complete.
She said it would take around six months to complete the complicated transfer of the old hospital, including the implementation of medical equipment and quality systems, while another three months would cover the transfer of patients and staff. This, she said, would inevitably result in “a period where both hospitals essentially operate simultaneously”.
Over and above the actual infrastructure of the facility, Akkelidou said the Health Ministry was currently examining upgrading the hospital’s management capacities.
“We have already signed a deal with foreign experts and I have already met with representatives from the company who will be co-ordinating the project.”
Public works department civil engineer, Savvas Kyriakou, who heads the new hospital’s construction work, told the Cyprus Mail the final total cost of the building was expected to reach £60 million, covering an area of 100,000 square metres. The equipment is expected to cost an additional £25 million, he said. Initially the budget had been estimated at a total of £53 million, for buildings covering 60,000 square metres.
