POLOKO TAU
HEALTH Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has announced that his department will be spending R150 million towards the upgrading of Chris Hani-Baragwanath Academic Hospital over the next year.
The hospital, with 2 800 beds, has been needled by infrastructural problems, leading to frequent power outages due to overloading. Its buildings have also aged and have not been well maintained.
At a media briefing at the 70-year-old hospital yesterday, Motsoaledi said: “maintenance hasn’t been very good. So everywhere you look for a problem you will find it, there’s no doubt about it.”
He said a team of engineers in various fields sent recently to assess the situation at Chris Hani Baragwanath had identified a number of problems and come up with a project plan of upgrading parts of the hospital using the R150m from the department.
“We wanted to look at what it would cost to make Chris Hani-Baragwanath functional,” said Motsoaledi.
He said 46 percent, or R69m, of the money would be used to upgrade the hospital’s 12-storey nurses’ home, which was in a bad state. The remainder of the allocated budget would be used for the upgrading of the labour ward; the neo-natal intensive-care unit; the labour ward; electricity; the mortuary cold room; bulk water storage; the intensive-care unit; old and new doctors’ residences; as well as walkways, among other things.
Chris Hani-Baragwanath will be one of six flagship national referral hospitals attached to a medical school, and will provide a training platform for health professionals and research.
Other central hospitals will be Polokwane Academic in Limpopo, King Edward VIII in KwaZulu-Natal, Dr George Mukhari in Ga-Rankuwa outside Pretoria, Nelspruit Tertiary in Mpumalanga, as well as Nelson Mandela Academic in the Eastern Cape.
The hospitals will each have 1 200 beds, which will mean a huge downsizing for Chris Hani-Baragwanath.
Motsoaledi said “international standards” dictated “a hospital should not have more than 1 200 beds to be managed properly”.
He said new hospitals would be built, including the 300-bed Jabulani-Zola Hospital currently under construction, to ease pressure on the new central hospital.
Once trimmed to a smaller-bed capacity, many building blocks would fall outside the new hospital. Motsoaledi said these buildings would be used for other purposes.