•Fourteen years later, in 2021, the Children’s Surgical Hospital in Entebbe was completed.
•At full capacity, the hospital aims to perform ten to fourteen surgeries per day.
Image: COURTESY
In 2007, the late Dr Gino Strada devised a project he hoped would revolutionise the country’s limited paediatric care.
The Italian surgeon called his close friend, Renzo Piano – best known for designing the Shard in London, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris – and asked him to design a hospital for children in Uganda.
“It was the shortest brief I ever got in my life to design a building,” Mr Piano says, recalling the conversation with Strada. “He told me, Renzo, I want you to design in Uganda on the Lake Victoria, a hospital, scandalously beautiful," The Telegraph reports.
“He used that word, scandalously. The scandal for him was, and I immediately understood the idea, that you want to make a place for excellence: medical, scientific, and human excellence in a place that is in Africa.”
Fourteen years later, in 2021, the Children’s Surgical Hospital in Entebbe was completed.
The hospital Run by Dr Strada’s charity, called Emergency, the facility was founded as an African centre of excellence – top surgeons from around the world will work alongside Ugandan doctors, providing children from across the continent life-changing surgery free of charge.
Asked if one has to pay lots of money for treatment, they said they do not discriminate rich or poor.
“The door is open for everybody. We don't ask how rich or poor you are,” says Emergency Uganda’s Country Director, Giacomo Menaldo.
“Our approach is, ‘Let's do what people deserve’. That is, the latest knowledge of medicine, the latest techniques, the latest equipment. Internally, we always say, would we bring our relatives and friends into our hospital? If the answer is yes, we are doing a good job.”
The facility is the second phase of the Emergency’s African Network of Medical Excellence programme.
The NGO, founded by Dr Strada in Italy in 1994, has partnered with the health ministries of thirteen African countries with a plan to build an integrated network of specialised facilities across the continent, training local doctors and transporting and treating patients from across the region free of charge.
Doctors here say the facility will transform Uganda’s paediatric healthcare system.
While 46 per cent of the country’s population of 46 million are under the age of 14, the 72-bed hospital alone will triple the number of paediatric surgical beds available nationwide. At full capacity, the hospital aims to perform ten to fourteen surgeries per day.
Daniel Katushabe is recovering from two surgeries to repair a congenital malformation of his urinary system, called bladder exstrophy, in the airy wards. He is from Kagadi, in rural western Uganda, where his parents farm sorghum and mill it to sell flour. His family learned about the hospital from a local organisation, and he made the 250 kilometre trip by bus and motorcycle taxi.
The 18-year-old had been incontinent since birth, and only managed to complete three years of primary school. While the other children played outside, he sat at his desk, unable to move and constantly damp. Sometimes he hid under his desk from shame.
“I hated myself,” Daniel recalls. “I didn’t even want my trousers to be close to my skin because of the wound, and I walked in a strange way so my trousers wouldn’t touch the wound.”
Now, a month after his second surgery, he talks cheerfully of the friends he’s made at the hospital, Promise and Wilson. “I can do anything,” he says – even play football.
As for the building itself, Dr Namuli says: “It is a work of art.”
The hospital was built using a mixture of traditional Ugandan methods and modern construction, with walls made from rammed earth, a fortified version of the mud-wall building method seen in many homes across the country. The solar panels on the roof provide 30 per cent of the hospital’s daytime power.
“The architect has brought the nature into the hospital,” says Dr Mira Kurup, a paediatric anaesthetic consultant at King's College Hospital in London, who is doing a placement at the Emergency hospital.
“Even in the middle of the night, sometimes I see [the patients] wandering around the corridors with a happy look on their face. And these children have had some of the most complicated surgeries and complicated anaesthesia which I have performed in my life.”
She adds that many of the hospital’s patients arrive at Entebbe suffering not only terrible pain, but from being outcasts.
“When these children come and have that disability removed or corrected, it's like giving back their life, giving them the right to go into society. You become a citizen of Uganda, where [before] you were an outcast.
“That is what the hospital is giving them. It brings great joy."