ADJUMANI DISTRICT BEGINS CONSTRUCTION OF SH1.6 BILLION INTENSIVE CARE UNIT

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BY MARKO TAIBOT

ADJUMANI: WEDNESDAY, 15 MARCH 2023

Adjumani district local government has launched the construction of a multi-billion Intensive Care Unit (ICU) worth Shs1.6 billion.

The facility constructed with funding from the World Bank under the Development Response to Displacement Impacts Project (DRDIP) will handle critical cases.

Once completed, the Intensive Care Unit will be fully equipped with four intensive care Unit beds, six high dependent bed monitors, life support, ventilators, oxygen plant, stable and sustainable power.

The district health officer of Adjumani, Dr Dominic Drametu, observed that the ICU will be a life serving facility for the district which has been grappling with a lack of ICU units for many years.

Drametu said the hospital currently has four Neonatal Care Unit beds which have been constrained due lack of critical nurses trained to sustain life.

“Once the facility is completed the challenge is the district does not have the critical care nurse and emergence care doctors like Surgeons, and physicians, we are going to do internal training of the existing nurses and doctors to start work in the new facility once it is completed,” Drametu said.

The contract for the building and equipping of the Intensive care Unit was awarded to Zawadi Construction Company Limited at the contract sum of shs 1.6 bn and the contract duration is six months.

The Adjumani Resident District Commissioner, Peter Taban Data, while handing over the construction site to the contractor cautioned against delivering second-rate work.

“We expect quality work, sometimes the procurement officials award contracts to some dubious contractors simply because they have soft hands but when it comes to contract management they deliver substandard work.”

The DRDIP desk officer, Gulam Abubakar, said the ICU facility is one of the projects the district is implementing out of the 27 infrastructure sub-projects under the 7th disbursement of DRDIP in host communities and refugees’ settlements.

He revealed that the 27 sub-projects have a total value of shs14bn and all the 27 sub-projects have a completion timeline of six months and that is when DRDIP’s first phase ends.

The Adjumani principal assistant Chief Administrative Officer, Richard Edema, noted that the goal of DRDIP is to address the adverse effects of hosting refugees by improving socio-economic services and infrastructure, expanding livelihood opportunities and enhancing environmental protection.

Edema said: “the current hospital which has a bed capacity of 100 beds is admitting more than 300 patients as a result of hosting refugees.”

Emmanuel Amaza, the managing director of Zawadi Construction limited that has been given the contract, appealed to the leaders in Adjumani to build the capacity of local contractors to avoid overdependence on National contractors even for delivering small volume contracts.

Amaza notes that local contractors are easy to manage since they live within the district and could be easily restrained.

Already out of the 27 infrastructure contracts under the 7th disbursement, two contractors have been identified as difficult and incorrigible since they have continually tried to deviate from the contract specifications while others are perpetually not at the site.

As the first phase of DRDIP is on the verge of closing, the Adjumani district has already benefited from 364 projects which have been funded. This includes;56 infrastructures, 155 projects in the environment, and 155 in livelihood according to a preliminary report issued by the desk officer.

DRDIP, a World Bank project designed for refugee hosting districts, started operations in the 2017/2018 financial year, but the actual implementation of sub-projects kicked off in the 2018-2019 financial year.

In the five years project lifespan, Adjumani district has received a cumulative disbursement of sh55.2bn.