CONNECTS
This is how a hospital is born
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N 2008, PWRDF built an HIV/AIDS counselling and testing centre with partners in the Diocese of Masasi. The project was a special intervention to supplement Tanzanian government services in education on HIV/AIDS prevention and provision of counselling, testing and treatment services. An environmental study was successfully conducted and one building with eight rooms was built and used as a base to provide mobile voluntary counselling and testing services to 16,000 people in surrounding communities The design of the centre encouraged people to get tested because they could discreetly enter without people knowing that’s what they were doing. In 2010, with support from Global Affairs Canada, the centre added a reproductive and child health care services building.The Tanzanian Ministry of Health provided health professionals and expanded the services. Soon it became necessary to build living quarters for a nurse, a trained midwife and a doctor. With health care providers on site, delivery of newborns at night became a reality and the decent residential housing buoyed the working morale of health professionals. Between 2012 and 2016, the clinic added a delivery room and maternity ward to provide a comfortable space for women to deliver their
babies and recover afterwards. Other rooms were arranged to give immunizations and carry out antenatal and postnatal check-ups. In 2016, the partners connected the buildings with concrete walkways then covered the walkways with roofing to protect people from sun and rain as they moved from one building to the next. The leaky roof on the reproductive and child health care building was repaired and new lighting systems were added to both using solar roof panels. In less than 10 years, the clinic grew from one centre to a collection of efficient, clean and connected buildings. The Ministry of Health was so impressed that in September 2016, it upgraded the clinic to a hospital. “It is quite an achievement when MOH seeks to expand and upgrade on the efforts of the Diocese of Masasi, PWRDF, Global Affairs Canada and local authorities to transform the Mtandi Health Centre from voluntary counselling and testing to a MNCH clinic and then to a hospital,” says Zaida Bastos, Director of Development Partnership Program for PWRDF. “This is a case where access to a greater variety, quantity and quality of health services on an increasingly more systemic level achieved the gold standard in impact and sustainability.”
Read this story online at pwrdf.org/60-stories/this-is-how-a-hospital-is-born/
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