Funds from China will help construct and equip the new National Surgical Centre at the Maputo Central Hospital, the largest hospital unit in Mozambique.
Mozambican news agency AIM reports that the agreement was signed in the capital last Thursday by Ivan Manhiça, permanent secretary of Mozambique’s Ministry of Health (MISAU), and Xu Weili, economic and commercial counsellor of the Chinese embassy. Around 288.66 million yuan (US$40.5 million) will be spent on the new facility.
No date has been set for the construction, but plans call for an eight-storey building with a 475-bed capacity, 19 of which will be for an Intensive Care Unit, as well as state-of-the-art equipment. It will also include 14 operating rooms, emergency services, imaging and a laboratory.
“The national operating theatre will not be just a building, it will be a beacon of hope,” Manhiça told AIM. “Our country has faced challenges in recent years regarding the provision of specialty health services, so the construction of this operating room represents an important step in overcoming many of these challenges.”
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The new facility will help cut wait times and improve clinical outcomes, while also ensuring the training of local health professionals, arming them with cutting-edge technologies and innovative practices to better serve patients.
Xu noted that China and Mozambique have a long tradition of cooperation in the healthcare sector. “Over the years, the [Chinese] government has been firmly supported in Mozambique’s health development, providing health care, infrastructure construction, human resource training and other aspects of cooperation,” she said. The first Chinese medical team was dispatched to Mozambique in 1976, just a year into their bilateral relations, established soon after the African country gained its independence from Portugal in June 1975.
Nearly 50 years later, the 25th Chinese medical team is hard at work in Mozambique. It organised a large-scale free clinic at Matola Provincial Hospital last Monday, offering consultations in a wide variety of fields, from gynaecology and obstetrics to cardiology to pain management to general surgery at Traditional Chinese Medicine.
One patient from Matola, Melia da Assuncao, told Xinhua, “Today is my first time receiving acupuncture treatment from a Chinese doctor, and I can clearly feel the pain in my neck has eased. I’ve already added the doctor’s contact and hope to arrange my next session soon.”
