Mbarara male, female medical interns share dressing room

Mbarara, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee has directed the administrators of Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital to immediately provide a separate changing room for female and male students, as they currently share one changing room.
The Deputy Chairperson of the committee, Hon. Gorreth Namugga, made the directive to the hospital administrators on Wednesday while appearing before the committee to respond to the queries in the 2024/2025 Auditor General’s Report.
Namugga asked why the hospital administration failed to improvise with a tent to be used by one gender, noting that the modernity of using tents is a common practice within the Hospital.
“It is risky!” Namugga exclaimed. “How do you make males and females use the same changing room? Madam, hospital administrator, have you taken care of the girl child? Because the boy child can improvise. Actually, if there is anything that should be looked into with immediate effect, it’s this, it is far below the required standard for a regional referral hospital.”
Dr Deus Twesigye, the acting Hospital director, agreed that the intern medical students, both female and male, share the changing room.
“The hospital doubles as a training entity for Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) and the original plan of our wards and other units never had the tutorial rooms and changing rooms for students. Therefore, when the university absorbed the hospital, it repurposed many smaller rooms and this was just one the rooms, which they repurposed as a changing room for all students”.
The Committee also questioned the administrators about the staff unit that also acts as a store for consumables, changing room and a store for staff food.
Dr Twesigye, did not deny to that accsatn, noting that the staff unit is used as the changing room for staff, store for the consumables like gloves, needles, syringes, Condoms, and also the staff keep there food as they report for work, blaming it to lack of enough Infrastructure.
She said that with such situations at the Referral Hospital, it is hard to upgrade it to a National Referral Hospital.
“Such a hospital needs to meet the standards, the basic standards of a Regional Referral Hospital, and you are yet to be upgraded to a National Referral Hospital, how can that happen when you’re operating like a district hospital?”
She asked how much money the hospital would need in terms of budget to operate to a standard that is of a Regional Referral Hospital or to meet the maintenance and repair of the hospital equipment alone.
In response, Twesigye said that it was hard to estimate but gave an example that hospital needed 53 million for drugs and consumables only compared to the 2.3 million shillings they currently use.
He said the hospital gets 201 million shillings for repairs and maintenance of machines, that include heavy machinery, the oxygen plants, ambulances, generators and other medical equipment.
Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital is meant to serve a population of over 6.7 million people in the districts that form Greater Ankole and the neighbouring regions of Kigezi, Toro, and Rwenzori.
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