MONTEGO BAY, St James — Minister of Health and Wellness Dr Christopher Tufton has announced that the State-owned Petrojam Limited, which is spearheading the Government’s efforts to establish a specialised burn unit in Jamaica, will be seeking the public’s assistance to make the project a reality.

“They [Petrojam] have put up some resources and they are going to be leading…the charge to raise some additional funds through corporate donations,” said Tufton who was addressing a function last Friday where the Montego Bay Comprehensive Health Centre in St James was adopted by Petrojam Limited.

Tufton noted that a dedicated burn unit will be expensive to create and support. He pointed out that some $200 million will be needed to establish the burn unit and another $60 or $70 million to maintain it.

The facility is to be established at the University Hospital of the West Indies and Tufton said that, “some concepts and designs and all that have been looked at, approved and agreed on”.

The health minister pointed out that while efforts are being made to make the burn unit a reality, this does not mean that the local health sector does not currently treat burn victims.

“I want to also say for those who have probed whether or not we treat burns in the public health system that we do. We may not have a unit to [deal with] high-degree burns and that’s why people have to go out of the country,” stated Tufton.

Last year, a private sector company, whose foundation has assisted several burn victims to get treatment overseas, had called for the establishment of a burn unit in Jamaica.

“I am making a passionate appeal to the Government, the Opposition and the private sector. Let us work together to establish a burn unit even at level two and have a memorandum of understanding with an external hospital for level three burn victims,” stated the project manager of the Sanmerna Foundation Stephen Josephs.

“The Sanmerna Foundation has been experiencing a high level of calls not just from Jamaicans, but also from the Caribbean Islands, to assist [people] who have experienced severe burns. The truth is we would love to help more burn victims but our resources are limited and we can’t help everyone as we would want to,” added Josephs.

Responding to queries by the Jamaica Observer last November, Tufton revealed that discussions were ongoing to have a burn unit established.

Last Friday Tufton underscored that it not often the people need treatment for high-degree burns in Jamaica.

“As bad as every single case is, [the] reality is that level of burn we don’t experience every day, thank God. Levels of burn that are more typical are dealt with in the public health system currently, but this burn unit [will] become a specialised unit that deals with advanced levels of burns, which sometimes happens unfortunately, and we have to move people outside of Jamaica to deal with those,” stated Tufton.

In the most recent case, 13-year-old Adrianna Laing — who was the sole survivor of a fire that claimed the lives of her three brothers in Springfield, Westmoreland, in September last year — was rushed to the United States of America for life-saving treatment.

The teenager, who suffered third-degree burns, underwent 18 surgeries while in America.