Uganda: White Elephants Take to Jinja Hospital ICU

The newly refurbished Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Jinja Regional Referral Hospital is under utilised due to understaffing at the facility.

The 10 bed-capacity facility has only five specialists out of 50 critical medical staff needed to manage it at full capacity.

Dr Alfred Yayi, the hospital director, says ideally every bed should be managed five specialists including a critical nurses, anesthetist, and other medical cadres however, currently they have only five specialists for the whole unit

“We need more critical staff, we are understaffed and currently operating below average, we don’t have even half the number of staff we should have,” he said.

Dr Yayi reveals that though the ICU was recently re-equipped with state of the art machines including electric beds, patient monitors, ventilators, CT scan machines among others but there are still other gaps which need to be fixed including piped oxygen system which is a critical requirement in the Intensive Care Unit.

“We have an oxygen plant but due to limited resources we can’t pump oxygen directly to the ICU ” he said

He also pointed out the absence of a regional blood bank as another big challenge at this regional referral health facility.

“All patients in the ICU are in critical condition so they have to be supported by oxygen, or they need blood but we don’t have a regional blood bank so sometimes we have blood shortage,” Dr Yayi said.

The refurbishment work undertaken by UPDF engineering brigade cost close of a billion shillings (1Bn) and it was commissioned by Minister for Presidency Milly Babalanda in March this year.

The ICU was enhanced from the two bed capacity to 10 beds but the problem has not been solved since current number of staff can manage only one bed.