PNM Tobago Council political leader Tracy Davidson-Celestine says the Scarborough General Hospital will be twinned with a hospital in New York, US, if the party wins the December 6 Tobago House of Assembly (THA) elections.

Davidson-Celestine, the THA Secretary of Health, Wellness and Family Development, said the initiative is meant to improve the overall delivery of health care in Tobago.

“In our next term of office, under my leadership, we are going to work to ensure that we expand the services at the health care level. We are going to work to improve the service delivery within the healthcare, and our aim is to ensure that we twin the Scarborough General Hospital with a hospital in New York,” she said on Saturday night, addressing supporters at the Mason Hall Secondary School.

“Because we want to be able, at the end of the day, to ensure that we have an exchange of personnel, and with exchange of personnel you can have a transfer of knowledge, you can have the transfer of skills...

“We want to understand standards of operating procedures that will help us to reduce the wait times at the health centres and also at the Scarborough General Hospital. And more so, we want to ensure that we have professionals who could train and help us here with our skills delivery.”

Davidson-Celestine said through the partnership, Tobago patients will be able receive additional medical attention at the New York hospital and return to the island for rehabilitative care.

She said twinning the hospitals will also promote the division’s thrust toward health tourism, “because we have been talking it for quite some time now. And I want to ensure that going forward, we are able to put our monies where our mouths are.”

In addition to benefiting the people of Tobago, she pointed out, "We can earn foreign exchange in the process.”

She told supporters the recently-opened Moriah Health Centre, situated in the electoral district, will benefit from the arrangement “where we can have better medical practitioners and where we can even start treating with the whole issue of cataract surgeries, even right within this electoral district.”

She told supporters the recently-opened Moriah Health Centre, situated in the electoral district, will benefit from the arrangement “where we can have better medical practitioners and where we can even start treating with the whole issue of cataract surgeries, even right within this electoral district.”

At a health briefing on October 26, Davidson-Celestine admitted the division was “struggling” to fully open the $98 million Roxborough Hospital, owing to the lack of special medical officers.

She said in order to meet this demand, a new THA administration, under her watch as Chief Secretary, would introduce ten annual scholarships “so that our young people can be trained in the subjects or specialise in areas for which we are lacking and more so, in the areas that we want to build out in Tobago."

She said while nurses, cleaners and wardsmaids could be found, this was not the case with speciali