Chief executive officer of the Linstead Public Hospital Camile Wallen-Panton has expressed delight after the health facility received a cheque for $3.6 million from proceeds of last month’s staging of the Tru-Juice 5K/Walk event, which was held at the Tru-Juice Orchards, Bog Walk.

Managing director of Trade Winds Citrus Limited Peter McConnell handed over the cheque to Wallen-Panton during a presentation ceremony held at the hospital’s boardroom yesterday.

Wallen-Panton said that her organisation is very grateful for the donation because this is a massive increase from the money received from the last staging, which was held in 2019.

“I am feeling overjoyed because this is a surprising amount of money,” said Wallen-Panton. The last time this event was held we raised $1.2 million for the Linstead Hospital and so this goes up by two hundred per cent and this is awsome for us and I am sure that the team will now sit down and decide what we are going to do with this money,” she said.

“This will certainly benefit the Linstead Hospital because we have been seeing hundreds of people every day because there is a busy highway and we have had accidents so frequently, we don’t want them to happen, but when they do, we want to ensure that at least we have the equipments that can take care of our patients,” Wallen-Panton stated.

McConnell, who is also the chairman of the Linstead Hospital, said he was very thankful to all the people that came out to support the event.

“It was a great turnout and I am very thankful to the marketing team that organised it and all the support that we got from all the participants and sponsors and the hard work of volunteers,” said McConnell.

“I must say that I was surprised with this money as well, because we had a target of over two million dollars, but when the numbers came in and it was 3.6 million dollars, we were also surprised as well,” he said.

This year’s event attracted over 1,900 persons, and according to McConnell, an even larger turnout is expected for next year’s staging.