By DALCY LULUA
THE Indonesian Government through its embassy in the country aims to build a new mortuary and new Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds for Port Moresby General Hospital (POMGH) in the coming months.
PMGH Chief Executive Officer Dr Paki Molumi said said feasibility study was carried out by the Indonesian team.
“We’ve completed the feasibility study, the Indonesian Team came and carry out the feasibility study, we already have the report, they provided a design of a mortuary and an ICU as well,” Molumi said.
“Now we are at the stage of reviewing those designs to ensure that it’s Papua New Guinea National Health Standards (PNGNHS) and the Australian Healthcare Standards.”
Molumi said once everything is done, they hope to complete all the paperwork by August and September so that construction could start.
“The project is US$50 million (K189.8mil), which includes the feasibility study, and the construction, that’s the total Grant Aid from Indonesia but after the complete design of the mortuary and the ICU, we should be able to know what each of this facility cost,” he added.
Dr Molumi said the mortuary has been a big issue in the country and for the general hospital as well.
“The mortuary has been a big issue for the country, the mortuary for POMGH was build 40 years ago, with a capacity to store 60 bodies. Currently we are storing up to 250-300 bodies in six other refrigerated containers and the scope of this (new) mortuary is to store up to 500 bodies,” he said.
He said they won’t have only a new mortuary but will build other facilities along with the new mortuary.
“We will have a cremation facility, we can have an embalm facility, the funeral service facility and on top of that we also want to do Forensic Medicine Department and Cardiovert Dissection Facility so that undergraduate and graduate student can train in those facility as well.
“That’s basically the scope of the mortuary so it’s going to alleviate the current issue of storing bodies.”
Dr Molumi further stated that PMGH should have a better cremation facility so that those who want to have cremation can have it because our mortuary at 9-mile is already getting filled up.
“We can have the embalm facility for those people who want to take their bodies out of the province, its going to take a few days before burial and off course a nice funeral service facility before burial,” he said.
Muslim further said That’s what we expect from this upcoming project for the new mortuary.
“For the ICU, currently we have six ICU beds, and the occupancy is 98% which means that patients in the Emergency Ward or other wards are waiting for ICU bed.
Surgery cancellation rate is currently at 35%, part of that is due to limited ICU space,” he stressed.
“In this project, we want to get it up to 25 ICU beds including six ICU beds for children so that we can be able to have enough intensive care bed to cater for patients needs,” Dr Molumi said
