Daily operations at the Morris F. deCastro Clinic on St. John are expected to resume by next week, according to a spokesperson for the Health Department. The Cruz Bay clinic that provides child and maternal health services, immunizations, health cards and environmental health enforcement closed its doors on Tuesday, citing staffing shortages.
The corner clinic located across the road from St. John Government House also houses the island’s ambulance hub. On Thursday an official of the Fire and Emergency Medical Services says operations at deCastro will resume ahead of other clinic services. Assistant FEMS Director Clarence Stevenson said the station will likely be up and running at its regular location by Friday.
The ambulance hub provides parking and maintenance space for up to three emergency medical vehicles and a headquarters for medical technicians. It also assists with transfers from St. John’s Myrah Keating Smith Clinic to the Roy Schneider Hospital on St. Thomas for patients with severe injuries or ailments. Since Tuesday, when the clinic closed, ambulances stationed in Cruz Bay moved their operations to the grounds of the Battery, where the office of the St. John Administrator carries out its daily duties.
Health Department spokesperson Christine Lett dismissed questions about conditions in the clinic building and whether that could have led to moving ambulances across the street. “I think they did move back; I think that was a temporary situation,” Lett said Thursday.
But the agency’s public information officer did acknowledge the presence of several Health Department workers inside deCastro Clinic the day after the closure. Lett said agency staffers from St. Thomas were there to conduct readiness assessments ahead of the reopening. “These are folks that work at our St. Thomas facility that were conducting a review of the operations,” she said.
Established in 1953, deCastro Clinic once served as the sole public medical provider for the island’s population. It resumed that role after storm damage wrought by Hurricane Marilyn in 1995 and hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 led to the closure of the Keating Smith Clinic — the island’s primary health care facility.
