Naguru Hospital seeks land as it shapes into national trauma centre

Oct 21, 2021

The hospital administration is thinking of expanding vertically, although this does not stop the need for more land to expand

Batibwe (second-right) receiving medical equipment from David Tumuhaise, the resident underwriter at African Reinsurance Corporation, a donation from the Uganda Insurers Association at Naguru Hospital

Edward Kayiwa
Journalist @New Vision

The China-Uganda Friendship Hospital Naguru, is seeking more land for expansion as it transitions from a general hospital to a national referral trauma and emergencies centre.

The hospital executive director, Dr Emmanuel Batibwe, said the current space occupied by the facility is too small, and, therefore, needs more land for expansion within its locality.

He said the hospital sits on five acres which were donated by Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), with capacity to hold about 100 beds.

“These beds are not enough, especially if we are talking about a national referral hospital. However, we also have a challenge of space for expansion and that is why we are seeking more land to expand,” he said while receiving items donated by the Uganda Insurers’ Association (UIA) over the weekend. The association donated equipment worth over sh200m.

Batibwe said in the meantime, the hospital administration is thinking of expanding vertically, although this does not stop the need for more land to expand. He said the facility needs about sh26b annually to erect new infrastructure and meet the human resources and other recurrent expenditure.

The hospital gets sh6.7b annually from the Government, of which 4.2b is spent on human resources.

He said the hospital also gets annual support from the Chinese donors worth sh200m in funding and equipment, although at times they encounter challenges in clearing them for taxes due to a small resource envelop.

“We are also looking at increasing the human resources to include neural surgeons, general abdominal surgeons, cardio surgeons, orthopaedics and cardiothoracic surgeons domiciled here for the emergencies, which needs a lot of money,” he said.

The UIA executive director, Paul Kavuma, said insurers are desirous of setting a tent at the hospital to help in the psycho-social rehabilitation of accident victims.

He said they pledged continuous support from insurers to the hospital that currently treats Kampala’s more than three million people.

“Many of the accident victims are our clients in one way or another, and for this we can only pledge support to build a strong trauma and emergencies centre,” Kavuma said.

In May 2018, Cabinet approved the proposal to have Naguru gazetted as a referral hospital in a bid to boost its capacity to offer specialised medical services.

The move was also meant to partly decongest Mulago specialised national referral hospital of the trauma cases as government positions it to become a super specialised hospital.

The move was also meant to bridge the patient-referral gap, between other health facilities and Mulago specialised hospital, thus improving service delivery.

Comments

No Comment


(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});