UMHT Building Projects
The hospital has various building projects in progress! If you would like to donate to any of these projects please click on this button and mention Tansen and the project name with your donation.
For more detailed information on any project, please contact umht.director@umn.org.np
Wastewater Treatment Project
The wastewater treatment project is designed to clean up the waste from the hospital using a Moving Bed Bio Reactor (MBBR) biological system. At the request of the local community, this will clean all the wastewater from our local community too. There were some delays in raising funds initially but the costs are covered now by a Rotary Global Grant and other funds donated by different trusts and individuals.
Phase one was completed in 2022 with the installation of a biogas plant attached to one accommodation block, which is also used to dispose of placentas. This produces biogas for the guesthouse. Phase 2 started with digging of pipelines inside the hospital compound in October 2023. We hope to complete this project in the first half of 2024.
Maternity Extension Project
Just under 2,500 babies are delivered a year and the service has outgrown our 18-bedded maternity ward. New mothers are regularly transferred to other wards soon after delivery with their newborn babies to free up space for new admissions. The nearest available space for expansion was into the present administration offices as these are in the neighbouring building at the same level. The admin offices will move to a new floor on our Orthopaedic and Paediatric ward block, as a third floor is not useful for clinical work without expensive lifts. Once this move has taken place, the office area will be completely renovated to provide post-delivery ward accommodation and a covered walkway will be built to transfer patients to this ward, which will be a safer place for mothers and newborns.
Work started in October 2023 and is due to be completed in 2024, thanks to a generous grant from Meterdaad EO via Interserve Netherlands and the UMN 2022 Christmas appeal ‘Welcoming Newborns’. There is a USD 15,000 shortfall in funding which we can make up from hospital capital funds, but donations are still welcome!
Long-term Plan for New Clinical Block
Some of the hospital’s buildings are now over 60 years old and built according to the technology available at the time. They were not built to the strict earthquake resistant standards of our newer buildings. We also have outgrown our present outpatient facilities and it is impossible to improve patient flow in the existing setup. The compound is small and so we have identified the only area which is available for development, where rooms were built to house TB patients and the very first clinics. This is adjacent to some very steep slopes.
In 2022 a team of experts from Article 25, a nonprofit architectural organisation based in the UK, visited and prepared a feasibility study.
This also gave suggestions of how to redevelop the really old buildings after we have moved outpatients and some wards to the new building. The next step is to prepare detailed plans. There have been setbacks in funding this new block, since the hospital lost large amounts of income participating in a national health insurance scheme: the deficit in reimbursement would easily have covered the development costs, but instead we used reserves to cover the losses up to when we had to leave the system. So now we need to fundraise for development costs, expected to be USD 430,000. Then the building would be an additional USD 700,000. Obviously the longer we wait the more the costs increase!