ADELPHI, St James – Residents who have tried out the $60-million Adelphi Health Centre are giving it the thumbs up.

“I’m a very hard person to please; I’m telling you the truth. But coming here this morning, it is way different from what I’m used to,” Winnifred Stoddart, a resident of the nearby Canaan community, told the Jamaica Observer on Tuesday.

Built last year, the health centre is seeing patients but will not be officially opened until later this month. Last weekend a fully paved parking lot and other finishing touches to the exterior were added.

“It’s different compared to the old one. The bathrooms are different, the doctors’ stations are different, the nursing stations, everything is very, very much improved,” Stoddart added.

She was there for a follow-up visit.

“It’s like a mini hospital. It’s very, very nice and the pavement, the car park, it’s superb,” she gushed. “The only thing I think this would need is just an ambulance service. Because you would have very old people and others who would want to access that but cannot, and they would have to take a taxi.”

An equally impressed Dumfries resident Leonard Webster also had suggestions on how to make the facility even better. He wants to see longer opening hours.

“Would love to see night and day type of thing here. Any little accident or emergency them nuh have to go Montego Bay, they could just do it here so,” he explained.

“Even up the top, them could put a few rooms up there where someone could sleep in the night,” he added.

Those things may not be on the cards any time soon but parish manager for St James Health Services Lennox Wallace told Observer West that residents can look forward to benefiting from an increase in the number of doctors available at the facility.

“We used to have doctors’ services two days per week, now we’re having doctors five days per week,” he noted.

There are also plans to upgrade the health centre to a Type 3 facility which means it will offer even more services.

Like some residents, Councillor Mark McGhan (Jamaica Labour Party, Somerton Division) also described the health centre to a “mini hospital”. He noted that it provides dental care and midwifery, plus other services that will be added later.

“We want it to be that inviting that you look at it as the first place you would want to go for the minor things such as asthma, that you’ll go to the health centre given that there’ll be more doctors,” he said.