
BY RICHARD DRASIMAKU AND GOODLUCK MUSINGUZI
ARUA: MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2024
There is a beehive of activity at the construction site for the Arua Hospital Intensive Care unit as wheelbarrow pushers make their way with mixture of concrete up the rums for casting the concrete upstairs as plumbing technicians drill through to walls to fix pipes for the water, electricity and sewerage lines.
Scrubbing, screeding, floating and troweling works are all going simultaneously at the different rooms in the two-floor building.
The works launched at the beginning of the year have hit 71% according to the site manager, Allan Sitakange, of the HASO Engineers Company.

Arua ICU is a complex that will have a unit for the neonatal, life-saving support facilities, digital monitors, ventilators and high dependable beds for male and female patients, and isolation section for contagious diseases.
Sitakange said the works could have gone further than now but were delayed by the closure of the Karuma bridge which affected the transportation of construction materials.

With funding support from the World Bank under the Uganda Covid19 response and emergency preparedness project, the ministry of health has invested sh7.9 billion into the construction of the Arua regional referral hospital ICU.
It is one of the 14 projects at regional referral hospitals that the ministry undertook with funds that were initially meant for vaccine acquisition to fight Covid-19.
The new facility will be a big leap in enhancing emergency medical care in the region, coming as a result of the lessons learnt from the Covid 19 pandemic.
At the time of the groundbreaking one year ago, the commissioner for infrastructure at the Ministry of Health, George Otim said the facility will help the people to receive specialized treatment that otherwise would have required an expensive referral to Mulago.

In West Nile, the Arua facility adds to the sh1.9b ICU that was built at Adjumani hospital, funded under the Development Response to Displacement Impact program to cater for the emergency care needs of the population in the district where South Sudan refugees outnumber the locals.