Dr. Shetty
Cardiologist Dr. Devi Shetty plans to partner with a local educational institution to open a medical school this year in Cayman as part of his medical facility.
Dr. Shetty, who was in Cayman for four days this week to meet government officials and local partners, also revealed that the first phase of the hospital project was expected to break ground in August this year.
“It is our plan to work with a current local institution to get [the medical school] going quicker… In the [initial] plan, the medical school was not supposed to start till the third or fourth year. We decided to expedite that,” explained local partner Gene Thompson.
The medical school will be based within an existing building at a local institution. Dr. Shetty declined to identify which local institution he was partnering with, saying the deal had not yet been “tied down”.
Dr. A. Raghuvanshi, managing director of Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitals, the group behind the proposed project, said: “By the end of this year, the coming academic year, we should start a medical school that will take about 100 students.”
Dr. Shetty said about 700 students graduated in Cayman every year, only one or two of whom opt to take medical courses after leaving school. He said that if there were a medical school on the island where they could train as doctors, nurses or technicians, one in seven graduates would go into the medical field,
“Healthcare jobs are the only recession-proof jobs,” he said, adding that in recent years, the only industry that created jobs was the healthcare sector. “Currently there is a shortage of three to four million jobs in the healthcare sector,” he said.
“No country should depend on foreign medical specialists to look after healthcare in their country. It is very important that the Cayman government and Cayman people train adequate numbers of doctors, nurses and technicians to look after their own healthcare,” Dr. Shetty added.
The hospital project, officially called the Narayana Cayman University Medical Centre, is slated to be built at the High Rock area of East End, where the Shetty group has bought 200 acres of a 600-acre site. The hospital, its associated assisted living facility and research centre will be built on the 200 acres, while related infrastructure, such as a hotel, will be built by Joseph Imparato, who sold the land to the Shetty group and who still owns the adjacent 400 acres.
The initial phase of the project involves the establishment of a 140-bed hospital, which if all going to schedule, should start accepting its first patients in August 2013, Dr. Shetty told reporters at a briefing Friday, 6 January, shortly before flying off island.
source: http://www.CompassCayman.com / by Norma Conolly, norma@cfg.ky / January 06th, 2012