Mulago National Referral Hospital has revealed being overwhelmed by the number of referrals for Intensive Care Unit (ICU) services coming in from both hospitals in Kampala and those upcountry.
Speaking in an interview, Mulago Executive Director Dr Rosemary Byanyima said that their ICU is always full owing to the high number of trauma cases that they receive in addition to cases of conditions such as stroke.
Byanyima who was responding to claims by social media users that the national referral facility is operating with only seven functional beds after the over twenty others stopped working maintained that all their equipment in the Adults ICU, Pediatric ICU and Organ Transplant ICU are functional.
However, a source at the hospital who spoke to URN on condition of anonymity seemed to concurr with the social media claims, saying that while there are twenty-seven beds installed, only about ten are being actively used.
When this was put to Byanyima, she declined to comment but instead said they would like to expand ICU services considering the high demand.
“We would like to expand ICU services given the need so we ask government to provide finances for more equipment, Human Resource and the drugs and sundries that go with such specialized services,” she said.
But, the issue of the much-needed ICU beds lying idle is not new as the Auditor General has also raised it in his 2024 report that was released early this year. According to the report, the hospital only had fifteen functional ICU beds last financial year, accounting for fifty-six per cent bed occupancy.
The report further noted that the hospital lacked trained personnel to run the equipment in addition to the fact that the facility lacked adequate space to fix the equipment.
Meanwhile, ICU services are very costly whereby patients part with up to four million shillings per day to afford such services in private healthcare facilities. The service in Mulago is subsidized whereby they charge between one million and 1.5million shillings per day and at times have to waive these fees for patients who cannot afford.
Because of this, Byayima says their ICU always operates with long, waiting queues. “Many refer from private hospitals for financial reasons and this is overwhelming us”, Byanyima explained.
For her, many of the challenges that are pushing people to ICU are preventable and therefore says to relieve the health system of the burden of specialized services, experts at Mulago hospital have embarked on preaching prevention through campaigns, outreaches and medical camps.
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