SUBIC BAY FREEPORT—A medical and wellness facility, complete with diagnostic, surgical and therapeutic wards, opened here on Tuesday to offer both out-patient and surgery services to customers in the Subic Bay area and the rest of Luzon.

The George Dewey Medical and Wellness Center (GDMWC), owned and operated by the George Dewey Medical College, is expected to put up medical, as well as recreational facilities worth $20 million, said Hermenegildo Atienza III, senior deputy administrator for business and investment of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA).

Company officials said the medical center has a total of 50 hospital beds now, but 150 additional beds will be put up soon.

The facility has machines for ultrasound, dialysis, mammography, mobile X-ray, computerized tomography (CT) scan, blood coagulation analysis and field angiosenalography.

It also has laboratories for bacteriological and pathological tests, a blood bank and an automated chemiluminescence system (ACS).

Aside from medical facilities, the company will also put up a nursing home, gym, shopping center, swimming pool, bowling alley and billiards hall to be used by both patients and visitors alike.

Atienza said the new medical center project brings to three the number of business locators that have set up health and wellness-related facilities in Subic since last year.

He also said the newest project will “complement the SBMA’s business thrust of putting Subic at the cutting edge of industries associated with health, medical tourism and education.”

Aside from operating a medical and wellness center, the GDMWC was accredited by the SBMA to engage in the operation of a nursing school and a research center, Atienza said.

The SBMA accreditation also indicated that the company may engage in other medical-related activities like the importation and distribution of pharmaceutical products and medical equipment.

According to company officials, the medical center initially opened its out-patient department and surgery ward on Tuesday, but full operation of the other facilities will start on May 8.

The project was inaugurated also on Tuesday, with company chairman and chief executive Dr. Solita Monsod and SBMA administrator Armand Arreza cutting the ceremonial ribbon. Businessman Dante Ang, chairman of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO), Olongapo City Mayor James Gordon Jr., Atienza, and several Subic business locators witnessed the event.

Atienza said the new medical center was preceded by two other medical hospital projects in Subic: Baypointe Hospital and Medical Center, which has committed P200 million last year for a medical-tourism facility and specialty health services; and TotalMed Subic Corp., which inaugurated a $10-million full-service ambulatory surgery center in March this year.

The George Dewey Medical and Wellness Center, however, “is so far the biggest, and with a full complement of medical equipment and facilities,” said Atienza.

Company officials said the new medical and wellness center will be a world-class facility comparable with the best hospitals in Metro Manila.

The center, which took over the facilities vacated by the former Subic Bay Medical Center, is located at a sprawling compound in Subic’s Cubi-Triboa District. The complex used to be the US Navy’s Cubi Hospital prior to the establishment of the Subic Bay Freeport in 1992.

The medical center now shares the complex with parent company George Dewey Medical College, which has tied up with the American Medical University (AMU) to offer courses in medicine and nursing.

The school, a staffer said, is owned by the family of businessman Dante Ang. The staffer clarified, however, that Ang, who showed guests around the facility on Tuesday along with Monsod, is not connected with the medical center.

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THE Australian government has expressed hopes that the free-trade agreement (FTA) with New Zealand and the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) will be signed within this year to facilitate trade growth in the region and remove trade and nontrade barriers.

MORE than half of the Philippines’ potential irrigable farmlands or 1.69 million hectares do not have irrigation and the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) estimates that it would take billions of pesos to provide irrigation to all these areas.

FRUIT and vegetable farming for Crispolo Galasa, 47, is an annual activity. The time to plant, harvest or \change the crops has been an agenda he knows by heart. All of a sudden, however, the whole schedule is in shambles.

THE Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) eyes a dramatic increase in mining investments in the next three years as local and foreign companies continue to support the government’s mining-revitalization program.

SUBIC BAY FREEPORT—A medical and wellness facility, complete with diagnostic, surgical and therapeutic wards, opened here on Tuesday to offer both out-patient and surgery services to customers in the Subic Bay area and the rest of Luzon.

THE ripple effect created by the government’s biggest tourism-development project, the Bagong Nayong Pilipino-Manila Bay Tourism City, would extend beyond the local hospitality industry and long after the year 2010, when locators in the project are expected to become fully operational.

SENATE President Manuel Villar Jr. is set to ask the Inter-Parliamentary Union IPM to use its collective clout in calling worldwide attention to the plight of countries encumbered by external debts and set in motion renewed efforts to push for “moratorium, condonation, or any other financial arrangements that enable debt-burdened countries to survive and rise again.”