Rosemary Byanyima, the Executive Director of Mulago National Referral Hospital
Mulago Hospital is set to expand its organ transplant services by embarking on liver transplant in April 2025.
Rosemary Byanyima, the Executive Director of Mulago National Referral Hospital made the revelation while appearing before Parliament’s Health Committee where she was presenting the Hospital’s 2025/26 Budget Framework Paper, where she requested the Committee to ensure that all funds for the critical medicines and supplies are availed in the budget in order to ensure that these transplants go on smoothly.
“We want to increase our scope of organ transplant. We want next year to bring on board liver transplant and we have been working with hospitals in India but we are now getting another team on board, through health education England and this is from the hospital in Manchester and its the team which is coming around April and May 2025 to do transplants with us,” said Byanyima.
He also warned that if all the Shs101Bn for the purchase of medicines isn’t availed in Mulago Hospital’s next year’s budget, the Hospital will be forced to keep sending patients to buy their own medicines and reserve the other medicines for the critically ill patients that require medicine by their bedsides.
“If we are to have no patients walk out to buy any medication, we would need Shs101Bn and currently, we are receiving Shs18.256Bn, so we will continue writing lists for patients to go and buy and we get of course backlash from the public. But you know, the areas of concern are those who are critically ill where you need to have the medicines by the bedside,” explained Byanyima.
The Mulago boss also called for the provision of Shs2Bn to train more specialists noting, “We need to train more specialists and it isn’t cheap because the training isn’t done here. We are requesting that we get additional budget of at least Shs2Bn so we can send more specialists to train in organ transplant, nuclear medicine, ICU and we need to also send our biomedical engineers to have more skills to be able to take care of our equipment.”
In order to boost the nutrition of the patients in Intensive Care Unit and children, Mulago Hospital is seeking for additional on top of the Shs1.4Bn that has been allocated in the Budget Framework paper to help the Hospital meet the nutritional needs for their patients.
Byanyima noted, “You know we still have a lot of malnutrition but also, our ICU patients need to be fed well especially the diabetic patients. We have a provision for our kitchen and we prepare special meals for them. Otherwise, even the surgical cases would end up not recovering well if you don’t advise and support them nutritionally.”
The Mulago Hospital Executive Director also raised concerns over the Shs3Bn provided in next year’s budget for water, describing the amount as meagre as it doesn’t meet even half of the hospital’s water demands.
She noted, “Then water we have been allocated Shs3Bn but we know that this is very small it is like a third of what we would require to pay off our water bills.”
