The Colonial War Memorial Hospital is expected to place a high priority on the health of its employees in order to lower stress levels and free them up to concentrate on patience and self-care.

Earlier this week, the Ministry of Health organized a media tour of the hospital, where questions were raised about the staff’s welfare and a space for them to rest as nurses’ rooms were converted into hospital wards.

Ministry of Health Permanent Secretary Doctor James Fong says they have moved their administration block out of CWM to create some more bed space around here.

“In one big viber group, we are all coordinating the discharge rate to create the bed space that can sort out incoming patients. That’s an established system that we’ve had for about six to seven years now that we’re going to increase the number of spaces that we have. And again, you know, this increase. The effective bed spaces will be mediated a lot by the amount of stuff that we have. We do know, and I haven’t mentioned the fact that we have graduates coming in and that we are now moving forward. We’ll have about 150 to 200 extra nurses moving on from internships into nursing. So then once we get that going, we can then start to recalculate how we can create effective bed space in the space that is available to us.”

CWM Medical Superintendent Dr. Luke Nasedra also assures that staff welfare is also being considered.

“There was a survey and feedback done with the staff in the hospital. And one of the problem areas that comes up is the need to look after the welfare of the staff, especially in terms of allowing them to have an area where they can sit back and relax for about 10 to 15 minutes and then come back into the clinical area. So this is also something that we’ve tried to do to identify spaces in the hospital, and we’ve identified the space. And this is something that we are throwing into this partnership that we need to create a space for staff to rest and relax.”

During COVID-19, some of the spaces in CWM Hospital were recreated as functional bed spaces.