PLANS to construct a 30-bed wing to create more capacity at the iconic Sir John Golding Rehabilitation Centre, St Andrew, which had been shelved due to the COVID-19 pandemic, are being dusted off thanks to an injection of funds which will come from the 2025 Sagicor Sigma Corporate Run scheduled for Sunday, February 16, 2025.

The 2025 staging aims to raise $115 million for Kingston Public Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU), Father Ho Lung and Friends Foundation, and Sir John Golding Rehabilitation Centre.

The former Mona Rehabilitation Centre opened in 1954 as a facility for the treatment of people suffering from polio, in response to Jamaica’s first and worst polio epidemic. It is the only integrated treatment and rehabilitation facility for the physically disabled in the English-speaking Caribbean. Currently, the centre focuses on motor vehicle crash survivors, children born with congenital abnormalities, and gunshot victims. It is the only public health facility that caters to amputees.

Stakeholders on whom the plans for the new wing were dependent had all but disappeared shortly after the pandemic upended the world in January 2020.

Addressing this week’s Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange, Christopher Zacca, president and chief executive officer of Sagicor Group Jamaica Limited, and chair of Sagicor Foundation, said the institution was more than deserving of being a beneficiary of the fund-raising 5K run/walk.

“When we sat down — again coming out of disabilities, traumatic injuries, or diseases which we are focusing on this year — Sir John Golding was a natural institution. They have not been recognised enough for their contribution to the health and well-being of Jamaicans over many, many years …there are so many people I know, who our team at Sagicor know, who have benefited from rehab at Sir John Golding Rehab Centre [that] we just felt it was important to bring in a new player,” Zacca said.

Dwayne Francis, chief executive officer of the centre, in thanking Sagicor for its decision said the centre “is one of the facilities that has not been given due acknowledgement for the work that has been done” over the years.

“The institutions that are chosen — Sir John Golding, KPH, and Father Ho Lung [Foundation] — are directly in line because when you have a situation of a patient in ICU, that patient most times, who cannot function outside, ends up at Sir John Golding. And when that person can’t now leave Sir John we have to then now lean on Father Ho Lung to say, ‘Can you take this individual?’ ” he stated.

He said the centre is keen on improving the services offered to its patients.

“So we do very aggressive physiotherapy services and also orthopaedic services. With additional support and equipment through Sagicor we will be able to boost the amount of persons who go through our services on a daily basis, because we would have had significant success stories – people who would have had spinal cord injuries who are able to walk, to move around – and it brings joy back to the family,” Francis told the forum.

Dr Rory Dixon, senior medical officer for the centre, said the entity, which has remained the same size since 1954 when it was constructed, is in dire need of the additional wing to also house new equipment.

“We cannot house equipment unless we have a building, so in 2020 we launched the programme called 2020 Vision where we proposed to build a new wing to house 30 new beds. It had been on hold because COVID came and wiped out those plans but we continued the panning in terms of sitting down with an architect pro bono. We are now at the stage where he has given us an idea how to get the space for the beds immediately, within a certain budget, which actually works out to be the budget for the Sagicor run,” he said.

“That building we are talking about, we are looking at over $500 million but the way the architect has done the design we can do it in phases. So the first phase to meet our immediate needs, we can create a space which can hold 30 beds easily, and that budget is around $50 million, it’s within budget for what we will receive from this event,” Dr Dixon said, pointing out that the additional space will enable staff to treat more patients in a timely manner.

The event is being sponsored by Walden University, Pan Jamaica Group Limited, Continental Baking Company Limited and GraceKennedy Limited.