Building and Furnishing the HITM

Abstract

Location The grounds of Asella Teaching Hospital and the affiliated medical faculty are situated at the entrance to the city. In the center of the area there is the hospital with its mostly singlestory buildings, which accommodate various wards, outpatient clinics, and laboratories, a pharmacy, laundry, kitchen, archives, and offices. It is a very active and constantly growing training center for medical professions. In the near future, a new building for the evergrowing Pediatric and Gynecological Departments is to be opened. Construction work has already started. Apart from physicians, nurses, laboratory personnel, and health officers are trained here. The latter have to complete a three-year training program, which partly overlaps with the study of medicine. Health officers provide basic medical services in Ethiopia, which suffers from a lack of physicians. They rank between nurse and doctor. A large modern library, seminar rooms, and a lecture theater are at the students’ disposal. A simple canteen and a couple of barrack-like dormitories provide food and lodgings. Especially in this area the number of students has outgrown the infrastructure. The medical students regularly complain about the poor hygienic conditions in the dormitories and the shortage and limited variety of food in the canteen. Governmental interventions are on the way to address this problem. The Hirsch Institute is also situated on the premises close to the hospital and the laboratories. The Building The building project was partly financed with a donation made by the entrepreneur Wolfgang Hirsch from Düsseldorf. Planning was done by Professor Häussinger and his staff in close cooperation with the architect Uta Groß, who was employed by the University of Adama and played a part in expanding the university. The planning envisaged a building with offices, laboratories, and examination rooms as well as a seminar room. The laboratory wing and the seminar room have separate entrances. There is enough space for a waiting area for the patients on the roofed terrace. There are outside toilets and, for hygienic reasons, the exam rooms can be entered from the outside. An outlying building housing a generator was constructed to provide a self-contained power supply and a water tank, which can hold up to 2,000 liters, was installed on top of a tower so that the institute is independent from the not always reliable municipal water supply – at least for a certain time. As the university was rapidly growing, it needed an experienced department of infrastructure, which promoted the building of the institute by a local well-known construction company. The one-story building of solid construction complies with the modern earthquake construction guidelines. A lot of timber was used for the scaffolding. Instead of using wheelbarrows, the workers carry the material by hand. It is striking that in this way of construction all power lines and water pipes are integrated into the concrete floor. The ultimate result was a structure that surpassed the local building standards.