Chienge district hospital nears completion

Chienge district hospital nears completion

Chienge, March 8, ZANIS ——– Luapula Province Permanent Secretary Mbololwa Muyaba has expressed happiness at the prospects of opening Chienge district hospital by August this year since all the works were nearing completion.

The Permanent Secretary who made a spot check on the progress of the hospital construction during her familiarization tour of Chienge district said she was looking forward to the final product which will service the district population.

She said once the hospital was operational, it would lessen on referrals to St. Pauls mission hospital in Nchelenge district since Puta clinic was not adequate to handle all the serious cases occurring in the district.

Mrs Muyaba said she was impressed with the quality of works though there were few areas that needed attention before the actual completion of the project.

She also observed that the ten staff house at the hospital were not enough as they were too few to accommodate all the staff needed to run the hospital and called for more staff houses.

She also noticed that the staff houses were being plastered before fitting in electrical wiring pipes which will call for chiselling the wall surface to fit in the electrical pipes which stage should have been done before plastering as the chiselling will remain showing on the wall surfaces despite painting the houses.

The Permanent Secretary also noted that the current contractor on site Hua Chang was constructing a corridor to connect two hospital structure buildings with a stretch of about 400 meters without footing in the foundation which had weakened the base and at the time of the visit, some blocks had already been swept away by a down pour which characterised the previous night.

Some workers found on the scene explained that the contractor needed close supervision by superiors because left to himself, the quality of works might not be to the required standard.

And when he was asked to do footing to the base before lining the blocks, site Manager Zaing promoted the communication flaws due to language barrier to defend his way of doing the work even though the rains of the previous night had proved his construction theory wrong.

And the Permanent Secretary promised to send a buildings Engineer from Mansa to go to Chienge and look at the works before the final completion so that where there was need for professional advice, the Chinese Contractor could be guided.

And Chienge District Clinical Care Officer Thomas Tembo disclosed that almost all the hospital equipment had been received in readiness for the commissioning of the facility in August this year except that the health facility needed a steady water supply and connection to electricity which processes were already in progress.

He said they have already sunk three boreholes except for the water tanks and the paper work with ZESCO have already been done awaiting action by the power utility company.

He added that the project had passed through three Chinese Contractors starting with Mango Tree who were on site from December 2009 and later handed over to Zamchin who were on site until six months ago when the current Contractor Hua Chang came on board.

He said the project which has gobbled KR6 million in phase one, KR4.2 million for phase two and KR 3million plus in the final phase.

The 36 months project which started in December 2009 and scheduled to be completed in December 2012 will be delayed for about eight months because of the changes in contractors, resulting in the project to end in August 2013 instead.