Uganda: ‘The Hospital of the East’ Can Regain Its Glory
St Anthony Hospital Tororo is one of the landmarks at the foot of Tororo Rock that welcomes you to Tororo – if you are entering the future city, from the direction of Jinja.
The hospital was started as a small 10-bed maternity unit by the Franciscan Sisters about 1960. It currently serves a population of about 148,000 people.
It was once ‘The Hospital of the East’ but over the years, civil strife, the impact of insecurity and human weakness all led to its deterioration. As a result, the quality and spectrum of its services have dwindled to the lowest extremes possible.
As a result, a cross- section of our people in the Eastern Uganda are forced to remain home to die when faced with the need to seek more sophisticated medical treatment by travelling to Kampala – or Nairobi.
The hospital management’s wish is to significantly reduce the need for our people to travel to Kampala for medical treatment. And this we hope to do by revamping and rehabilitating whatever has become degenerate. This includes
The infrastructure
Equipment and instruments
Staff skills, attitude and levels of education. The guiding goal is to make St Anthony’s a university teaching hospital. In the course of arriving at this goal, every requirement to make it a very good hospital will have been met.
The infrastructure
Staff hostels – The state of disrepair in both is such that none of the hostels can be used in the current state. The staff have been relocated into the surgical ward for as long as it will take to renovate the hostels. BOQs are estimated at sh209 million White House and sh242 million for the Brown House.
Theater – There are cracks in the wall, most likely caused by the unilateral sinking of part of the theater floor as the result of its being built on relatively softer soil. There has been fear that the roof may collapse on the surgeons. Putting this right is important as this is an important revenue center for the hospital. The cost of resolving this problem is estimated at sh250 million.
Doctors Residences: The inhabitable state of these houses means we cannot take on any more doctors even if they were willing to come on a purely volunteer basis. Before we are able to take up intern doctors, this is a major challenge we shall have to surmount. BOQs for repairs have been estimated 159,870,626 UGX only for house No.1 and 158,022,806 UGX only for house No.2 respectively.
Mortuary: St Anthony’s hospital mortuary is in a dilapidated state without a door but is also standing in the space that has now been designated for a Diagnostic Center. A new one therefore has to be built with good Funeral Home Services and with Autopsy facilities. A facility of this standard is not yet available in Tororo and therefore while the service would be welcome the intervention would also be an additional source of income for the hospital.
Maternity: The maternity building has parts of its plaster peeling off. In the long run this will lead to significant damage to the walls of the building with greater cost implications for renovation. It is therefore important to correct this as soon as possible.
Diagnostic center: The diagnostic center will unlock St Anthony’s potential to fill in a range of Diagnostic gaps being experienced in Tororo and Eastern Uganda at large: These include MRI, CT scan, diverse laboratory tests including immunology, microbiology, hematology and chemistry alongside the daily clinical laboratory services.
The majority of the aforementioned tests are currently being sourced from Mbale or Jinja and clients spend unnecessarily vast resources to seek them from that far.
We shall not only offer affordable services but will do it with the honor to reduce the burden on our esteemed clients in moving long distances to seek medical care that is currently out of their reach.
Bishop James Odongo Surgical Ward: The toilet system in this ward is completely broken down and needs to be overhauled at an as yet incompletely costed amount but in any case, not less than sh18 million.
Convent building of the Little Sisters of St. Francis: Unfortunately, this building got burnt down under unclear circumstances about 2016. One of our objectives is to establish a nurses and midwifery training school. This building has been envisaged as potential accommodation for students once renovated. Engineers were of the view that it could be salvaged and put to good use. Renovation costs estimate not yet complete.
Medicine store: This building was built by the Archdiocese of Tororo with the objective that it serves as a store to ease the distribution of drugs and sundries to the entire eastern region. Eventually its use for that purpose declined and St Anthony’s Hospital was the only hospital using it to store medicine. However, because of its distance from the main wing of the hospital, it was not possible to implement effective security and theft was rife. Hospital management with permission from the BOG therefore shifted the medicine stores into the main hospital grounds and theft came to a halt. It has been considered as a potential, adequate and underutilized space for the Nurses and Midwifery training school.
Equipment and Instruments
A wide variety of equipment is necessary to bring St Anthony Hospital Tororo (SAHT) to the level of a Regional Referral Hospital. It is the availability of these equipment and instruments that will attract the presence of specialists and therefore enable the availability of specialized services. The required equipment has been valued sh350 million.
By Independent (Kampala).
