The emergency department

In this post, we will tell you some more about the emergency department that is going to be built at Kolandoto Hospital. But before that, we want to give you some more background information about the hospital itself. Kolandoto Hospital was founded in 1913 by a missionary couple from USA and is run by the African Inland Church of Tanzania. It has 183 beds, divided in a total of 7 inpatient wards, as well as some out-patient wards. Since 2013, Kolandoto Hospital is a Council Designated Hospital. This means that it gets funding from the Tanzanian government and is part of the country’s hospital organization as one of the District hospitals in Shinyanga region.

Since the hospital is classified as a district hospital, it should provide emergency care to those in need. Currently, the hospital has no specified department for patients that needs acute help, and the emergency department will therefore be an important addition to the hospital. . As we told you in our previous post, a major thing that we spend our time with here is helping and supporting the hospital in building such an emergency department.

Parts of the hospital management group after one of our meetings with them

For Emma and Maria, the engineering students, the main focus is to assist in the procurement process. This means things like meeting with prospect contractors (builders), going through and analyzing the tenders that the contractors provide, and also being part of the contract process. A tender is a document that the contractor provides. It shows what materials and parts that will be included in their building, their quantities and costs. The tenders are then compared to each other to make a decision on which contractor to choose. After this, a negotiation will be held before the contract is signed by the hospital and the contractor.

For architect students Sandra and Emelie, the focus is to help with the drawings, explaining them to the contractors and making changes according to the hospitals requirements. They are also the ones who prepare the material for applying for building permits at the municipality office.  The building permit is usually issued within a few weeks after the application is sent in, and sometimes the building process is started before the permit is issued.

Meeting with one of the contractors that has given a tender for the emergency department

We are now in the middle of this process, where a contract will probably be signed within a week, and building permit application is about to be sent in. It is really interesting to be part of this process that runs much faster here than it would in Sweden. If assuming that the continuous process will be as fast, there is a good chance that the emergency department will be halfway ready before we leave in the middle of April. This process will be continuously followed during our time here, so stay tuned for updates! 

Karibu sana!

Welcome to our blog that will tell the story of four master students from Chalmers University of Technology doing their master thesis at Kolandoto Hospital in Tanzania. This first post will be a short introduction of who we are and what we are doing here. We invite you to follow us in the work we do at the hospital as well as reflections over how we manage cooking, shopping and learning Swahili.

The four students that are working together are architectural students Emelie and Sandra, and civil engineering students Emma and Maria. Together we are working with the hospital in the process of procuring and building an Emergency Ward at the hospital. This building was designed by another master student last year, Lisa Bergstrand. You can read more about her work and other previous implementations within the Kolandoto Healthy Hospital project here.

Behind the flag pole is the site where the emergency ward is going to be built

Apart from the work with the emergency department, Emelie and Sandra will also design a private and maternity ward during their time here. Maria and Emma will also conduct an evaluation of previous work done at the hospital.

Emelie and Sandra presenting the drawings of the emergency ward to the Hospital Management team

We have quite some work ahead of us, but we have already started the process of the procurement for the emergency building, which we will tell you more about further on. We look forward to our time here and hope we can contribute within the project to make a difference.