The United Nations (UN) office in Nairobi has partnered with the Nairobi Hospital to put a covid-19 treatment facility for their staff and family members in Africa.
The 160-bed facility will be set at the old nursing school just opposite Nairobi Hospital will take five to eight weeks to complete. UN needed at least a facility with 100-bed capacity to carter for Covid-19 victims only.
The facility will be fully staffed, operational and diagnostically capable to care for Covid-19 victims with severe and critical respiratory problems.
Reports also indicate that UN wants to care for mild, moderate and high-risk cases primarily depending on severity but the unit will only care for Covid-19 victims, therefore it will have no surgical capabilities.
Elsewhere UN has set aside 100 beds at a city hotel for its staff who may require isolation. “Construction of the facility starts July 20, to open in six-to-eight weeks. It will have an operating theater, laboratory, radiology and physiology services and an initial bed-capacity of 150 including 25 intensive-care and 50 high-dependency units,” Nairobi Hospital CEO Allan Pamba said.
The care for the staff has been critical to the organization and in June, UN published a detailed medical evacuation protocol.
The protocol instructed staff who develops severe symptoms of the respiratory infection to be evacuated to a facility that is fully equipped with highly skilled staff to handle patients with severe acute respiratory complications.
Staff eligible for evacuation include foreign and local staff and their dependents, military and police personnel, dependents deployed by the UN and troops serving under African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM).
It is still not clear if the facility will be also be open to non-UN Covid-19 victims that its construction comes at a time when cases of Covid-19 in the country are rising in Kenya after movement restrictions and lockdowns were lifted.