Contractors are racing to complete an emergency hospital for the United Nations in Nairobi that is being set up under a partnership with the Nairobi Hospital, a top healthcare facility in East Africa.
The new hospital will cater for UN workers and family members in Africa. The UN’s Africa headquarters is situated in Nairobi, with other offices in Ethiopia. Apart from UN patients, the facility will also accept non-UN patients.
The facility will have an operating theatre, laboratory, radiology and physiology services. It will have an initial capacity of 150 beds, including 25 intensive-care and 50 high-dependency units. The project is worth approximately Kes 1 billion.
The UN approached the Hospital’s administration in April 2020 for a partnership arrangement in the clinical management of COVID-19. The UN has 20,0000 staff and families based in Nairobi. Epidemiological predictions indicate Kenya is likely to face a surge in COVID-19 infections towards the end of this year. However, the available Hospitals and ICU beds within the country are limited and projected to be overwhelmed. The UN recognized the need to contribute to the pool of COVID care beds and facilities in order to have a reliable referral facility for its staff and families.
Further, Nairobi is the regional medical evacuation centre for the UN, with several peace keeping and humanitarian hubs within and beyond Africa looking to have a Medevac Solution in Nairobi for severe or potentially severe cases of Covid-19. The Government has prohibited any incoming COVID-19 medevac into Kenya to avoid strain on available infrastructure. The Government has further indicated that the approval of Medevac would be subject to UN demonstrating its support of COVID infrastructure expansion at a local hospital in a partnership arrangement.
The project has extremely tight deadlines with work expected to have been complete within 28 days.
Blink Studio, a respected architectural and project management firm are the project managers. According to a spokesperson, the plan is to have the contractor work 24hrs a day in three different shifts, each shift running for eight hours. “In addition, the contractor is expected to section the works into three areas running concurrently with a full complement of staff. Procurement pre-planning, sequencing of works and foreseeing challenges at each stage are also critical.”
He revealed that the project team had already experienced some challenges during the raft foundation setting stage. “Setting of the anchor bolts took longer than expected leading to a 6-day delay on these two aspects of the project. We however have put in place mitigation measures to see the project completed on time.”
