Our Frontline Worker of the Week is… Dr. Allan Outridge

Jul 04, 2021 News

By Vanessa Braithwaite

Kaieteur News – While many health care workers have found it difficult to navigate the pandemic, particularly while providing health care services to persons who may potentially infect them, Dr. Allan Outridge, a Cardiologist who presently serves at the Linden Hospital Complex (LHC), has defied the odds. Not only has he raised the bar for providing essential services during a pandemic at the public institution he serves, but he has undertaken a monumental project that has allowed residents of Region 10 to receive quality health care at a private institution.

The Empire Medical Centre

During the pandemic, Dr. Outridge was able to set up the Empire Medical Centre – Linden’s first private medical institution offering specialised services to residents. While the project commenced in 2019, the Cardiologist was determined to complete it to the point of making it operational so residents can access a plethora of essential medical services that were not available in the Region. But this was not easy to bring to fruition during a pandemic. However, with the help of other investors and financial lending institutions, the spanking new modern Medical Centre has been operationalised.
Reminiscing on his journey from changing a vision into reality, Dr. Outridge said he was basically determined to give the residents what they deserved.
Dr. Outridge, during a recent interview, revealed that he began serving at LHC in 2014 and was discouraged at the fact that critical health services such as specialised ultra sounds, CT scan and others, were not accessible in a Region that has more than 40,000 residents. This was the motivating factor behind the establishment of the centre, said Dr. Outridge, as he recalled going to China in 2016 to specialise in cardiology. Upon his return, he said that he realised that specialised health care services were still lacking in the Region. He then got the ball rolling. “My vision for this centre is to offer Lindeners a service that is second to none, that they have been deprived of for so long. For obvious reasons (or) for reasons unknown to us, Region 10 does not have a CT scan machine.

Dr. Allan Outridge.

To know that you don’t have the conditions or laboratory requirement to do a panel of female hormones or if you want a proper ultrasound, you have to travel all the way to Georgetown…” can be quite disheartening the doctor noted. As a result, Dr. Outridge said that his objective is to give the residents of the Region “services that they should have received a very long time ago.”
He reiterated that it was something the community needed and it brings him immense satisfaction to be a part of a project that will reduce the financial burdens, inconvenience and stress of residents having to journey to another Region to benefit from quality healthcare. He said it was also a way to repay residents for their outpouring of love and support during his time at LHC. Lindeners, he said, treated him like one of their own, though he was not born and raised in the mining town.
At Empire Medical Centre, residents can access a plethora of specialised health services including outpatient, emergency and cardiovascular management. “I didn’t want to wait until the public system gets these things, I have the ways and means and that is what I did to offer the services to the people of Linden,” he said.
He revealed that, currently only 10 percent of all the services that can be accessed is available. But Lindeners, he said, can expect even more specialised services, including paediatric and orthopedic, as well as in-patient services in the near future. These services, he said, will be available on a 24-hour basis. “Expect to see exactly what you deserve, what you should have gotten all those years ago and did not get; you will get services that are second to none…that is a group of specialised services,” he said. The official opening date for the Empire Medical Centre is slated for October 24, 2021.

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