The Shadow Minister of Health has praised the release of a hospital review report, but urged the Government to be more transparent about plans for the future.

Louise Jackson was commenting following the release of preliminary accreditations report for the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital (KEMH) and the Mid Atlantic Wellness Institute (MWI).

The hospitals are reviewed every three years by the Canadian Council on Health Service (CCHS) for accreditation through an on-site visit and this year for the first time the organisation approached patients for their opinions.

Also for the first time since the two hospitals have been accredited, the Bermuda Hospitals Board (BHB) decided to release the preliminary report to the public.

Mrs. Jackson said she was happy to see the report had been released but called for the Government to be equally forthcoming with the hospital plan.

She said: "The state of the hospitals is a community problem, not the private province of Premier Brown and his famed Saturday Morning Group.

"If the community knows what is wrong, and understands that efforts are being made to fix the problems, then its level of anxiety will be reduced considerably.

"For as long, I should add, as those remedial efforts continue. The King Edward Vll Memorial Hospital is not in the best of shape.

"As the report points out, the buildings are now very old, and suffer from a variety of problems.

"Some of them can be fixed, and we trust work will be undertaken swiftly to deal with them, but some will only be fixed when a new facility is built.

"In the interest of the transparency the CCHS refers to, I once again urge the Government to take us, the public, into its confidence where plans for this new facility are concerned.

"They seem, in the past two years, to have dropped completely from the public agenda."

The need to replace the KEMH, as well as (MWI), was underlined in the Estate Master Plan review three years ago, which concluded the hospitals were at the end of their useful life.

A second round of reports were ordered through Johns Hopkins, with the first phase of this report released to the House of Assembly at the end of February this year.

It did not contain details or designs of the new hospital but did recommend the new facility should be able to accommodate 124 acute-only care beds with additional "shell space" for around 30 beds, to allow for future growth.

And also recommended non-acute patients should be moved to other health care facilities and a new payment method should be implemented in order to make the new hospital cost effective and efficient.

The second part of the Johns Hopkins report should be released later this year.

The hospitals can also expect their accreditation awarded in December following the submissions requested by CCHS on areas such as the control of patient medication, planning for emergencies, consistency of practice, patient fall prevention, communication and self-examination and analysis.

Mrs. Jackson, added that she was concerned about the medication mismanagement and that it must be more than a mere difference in methods.

She said: "I am increasingly concerned about the control of patient's medication. It has been highlighted by the hospital's accreditation process so obviously they are concerned about a control of patient medication of lack there of.

"These faults were of sufficient concern to have caused CCHS to issue a provisional accreditation only, which means that we have a few months to clean up our act sufficiently to persuade the organisation to grant us full accreditation.

"However, I believe in giving credit where credit is due, and I must say that I was very pleased to note that improvement and progress is in evidence in many of the areas reviewed by the CCHS.

"Indeed, the Critical Care Unit was praised highly for its work, and for its "award-winning design."

I want to congratulate all those who have had a hand in this progress, from the Board and the CEO, David Hill, down to those who fight in the trenches.

"The work you are doing is much appreciated by the concerned citizens of Bermuda, because you are restoring the pride we once took in these facilities, pride that has been severely damaged by years of mismanagement and amateurish government interference and tinkering."