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Why the emergency field hospitals donated by Qatar are still sitting in storage

Why the emergency field hospitals donated by Qatar are still sitting in storage

Caretaker Health Minister Hamad Hassan receives Qatari officials delivering two emergency field hospitals to Lebanon one month ago today. The hospitals are still in storage. (Credit: Dalati & Nohra)

BEIRUT — One month ago to the day, two Qatari freight planes touched down on the tarmac at Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport. On board were two 500-bed field hospitals, destined to increase Lebanon’s capacity to treat COVID-19 patients in the cities of Sur and Tripoli.

At the time, caretaker Health Minister Hamad Hassan described the donation as a “gesture of hope and a ray of goodness” during the pandemic.

Now, one month later, the tented hospitals, beds and medical equipment are still in their boxes, stacked up in a warehouse under the Sports City stadium in southern Beirut.

Meanwhile, though daily cases have seen a slight decline following a two-week nationwide lockdown, the number of people needing hospital beds is rising. Four out of every five beds in COVID-19 intensive care units are occupied.

“We really need the hospital to be put in place and start working as soon as possible,” Ali Darwish, an MP from Tripoli, told L’Orient Today. “We have a high level of infection and the hospitals in the area are nearly full.”

On Monday, protesters from Tripoli gathered outside the Health Ministry in Beirut demanding the installation of the hospital in their city.

Later that day, the caretaker health minister gave a press conference at which he said several factors were preventing the hospitals from starting operations, including a lack of staff, inadequate equipment and indecision on where the Tripoli hospital should be located.

The Health Ministry’s technical team, accompanied by Darwish, initially visited the Rachid Karami International Fair grounds as a potential site for Tripoli’s field hospital.

However, the grounds were deemed unsuitable, Darwish said, after inspectors found unstable, partially collapsing concrete structures, which posed safety risks.

A member of the ministry’s team, who asked not to be identified as they are not permitted to speak to the media, said the team is in talks with several private and public hospitals in Tripoli to see if they can place the field hospital on one of their sites.

In Sur, the union of municipalities has already prepared a site for the field hospital — 5,000 square meters of land in the city’s public park — but is waiting for instructions from the Health Ministry in order to proceed.

“We will offer all the help we can to prepare for this hospital,” municipal union head Hasan Dabouq said. “But now it’s up to the Health Ministry.”

Local MP Inaya Ezzeddine said the ministry had not presented a clear plan or timeline for when work on the hospital would begin.

The ministry worker attributed the delay to the complexity of setting up a hospital fit for treating hundreds of COVID-19 patients.

“A field hospital is not generally meant to be a permanent fixture for treating patients,” the worker explained. “It’s usually a temporary set-up for wars and disasters to provide first aid and emergency surgeries until the patient can be moved to a normal hospital.”

Preparing the field hospitals to receive coronavirus patients requires significant infrastructural work, the ministry worker continued, such as installing plumbing and adequate sanitation facilities to ensure potentially infectious medical waste does not pose a risk to the surrounding community.

The ministry must also hire teams to care for patients at a time when Lebanon’s health care system is already confronting staff shortages. Hospitals up and down the country are struggling to staff their COVID-19 units, with doctors and nurses forced to work long hours and extra shifts with dismal pay.

“There’s no point setting up the hospital if we don’t have what we need,” the ministry worker said. “Whether it’s staff, logistics, infrastructure or anything else.”

In his press conference Monday, Hassan offered similar justification for the delay, saying it was better to wait until the hospital was fully equipped than to do a rushed job.

He said that he had contacted the World Bank to provide funding for additional equipment, but that “bureaucracy” was standing in the way. The World Bank’s Lebanon office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

Once the land and infrastructure are deemed fit for purpose, the Lebanese Army will be responsible for putting the hospitals in place.

Spokesperson Col. Elias Aad said that the army is ensuring the materials are properly stored in the Sports City complex until they are called upon to transport and install the hospitals.

The Health Ministry worker could not give a timeline on when the hospitals are expected to be operational, but said that “things are moving in the right direction.”

As the wait continues and health facilities are stretched further, local authorities are growing frustrated.

“So far we have been able to cope in Sur,” Ezzeddine said. “But if something more serious happens in the coming days or weeks, I don’t know what we can do.”

Darwish was similarly concerned. “The hospital needs to be installed as quickly as possible,” he said. “It’s unjustified that it takes any longer than this.”

BEIRUT — One month ago to the day, two Qatari freight planes touched down on the tarmac at Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport. On board were two 500-bed field hospitals, destined to increase Lebanon’s capacity to treat COVID-19 patients in the cities of Sur and Tripoli.At the time, caretaker Health Minister Hamad Hassan described the donation as a “gesture of hope and a ray of...