Palace for Princes
Qasr El - Aini Hospital

Founded in the 30's of the last century, the Qasr El-Aini Hospital complex is synonymous with Egyptian modern medicine. The new state-of-the-art Qasr El-Aini Hospital, inaugurated by Presidents Hosni Mubarak and Jacques Chirac of France, signals a will to do better.

Dr. Fatehi Iskander, professor of surgery at Cairo University, was general manager of Qasr El-Aini hospital between 1986 and 1973. Iskander thinks the new hospital is a "step forward that will reflect on the medical profession in Egypt, whether on the practice and training of the students or on the welfare of the patients". In late 1973, "we noticed an increasing gap between the floor and the walls of the third story of building," Iskander said. When the university's engineering committee decided the building was to be evacuated, the whole hospital transferred to Manial hospital.

 At the time of transfer, the three-store hospital had five surgery units, one for urology, besides the faculty's ear, nose and throat, psychiatry and dermatology departments. Moreover, the hospital's 400 beds were all in wards, not private rooms. "Because of its small scale, the hospital was quite disciplined and we could easily control the work of nurses and junior doctors," Iskander added. Rebuilding the new Qasr El-Aini hospital took from 1984 to 1995.

The project, costing LE 750 million, took time; the latest building materials and technological facilities were used.

Dr. Moufid Shehab, President of Cairo University and chairman of the board of the new hospital, explained the main reasons for the delay in establishing the hospital and getting work off the ground. The first was a legal problem, occurring at the onset of the project, and questioning the validity of signed contracts. The second, a financial problem, involved the costs of services provided by the French side. "The French side halted the execution of the project until it received the differentials in equipment prices that took place since our first signature of the project," Shehab said.

According to Dr. Fouad El-Nawawi, general manager of the new hospital: "The estimated budget provided by the French government at the beginning of the project, in the form of loans to be paid back, on a soft interest base to the French, did not cover all the requirements of the hospital before the end of its full establishment. President Mubarak made contacts with the French political leadership in 1991, and the French side provided Egypt with a non-refundable grant to complete the hospital', El-Nawawi added. Built on a total area of 84 thousand square meters, the new Qasr El-Aini Teaching Hospital is a 12-store building. In addition to Cairo University Hospital's 4,000 beds, the new hospital has more than 1,200 beds; 999 in the public section and 208 in the private.

Between 5,000 and 6,000 employees staff the new hospital.

In the basement and on the ground floor are the laundry rooms, emergency area, radiology unit, surgical intensive care with 24 beds and sterilisation units, the blood bank, central kitchen, boilers, cargo reception area and a morgue. The administration, laboratories, physical therapy unit and cafeteria are on the first floor. The second floor houses the medical intensive care unit, general medicine and uro-surgery units.

Accommodation in floors 3 to 7 is divided into four zones; A, B, C and D. Each zone has 40 beds, making a total of each 160 in each floor. Because the second floor accommodates the intensive care unit with 20 beds, it is the only floor with fewer beds.

In the public hospital, each wing holds four double-bed rooms, four six-bed rooms and two four-bed rooms. Within each zone, doors are of different colors to help patients locate their rooms if cannot read.

Each zone has its own food outlets, staff and nurse stations and examination rooms. Separate lockers, eating trays, side-lamps, telephones and calling systems are installed for each bed. Although each room has its private bathroom, there is a public bathroom for all the patients in each zone, with special facilities for the handicapped.

Presenting an alternative to medical treatment abroad, the private hospital, on the eighth and ninth floor, has 208 beds. Although the hospital provides the same quality of services available in other private hospitals, the cost is less than its counterparts. Unlike the public hospital's rooms, which take up to six beds, all rooms in the private hospital have either single or double beds.

Each floor has four wings with 26 beds in each wing, distributed among 11 double-bed rooms and four single-bed rooms. The private hospital is totally independent from the rest of the hospital. Besides a private entrance and six elevators, the eighth floor has two surgery units, two consultation clinics, plaster room, recovery room, sterilisation unit, laboratory, pharmacy and kitchen. The private hospital's pharmacy, four consultation clinics for ophthalmology, ear, nose and throat, internal medicine and surgery, a dining room, managerial offices and laundry room are on the ninth floor.



The tenth floor, not for public use, houses the 27 elevators' control rooms, electricity generators and central air conditioning units.

" The hospital is the first in Egypt to include a 7 giga-byte central computer system encompassing all information on the hospital through four central terminals, 20 personal computers and 48 printers connected to the main servers," says Emad Rasmi, professor of biomedical engineering at Cairo University, and a member of the University's supervisory engineering committee.

Unlike most other hospitals which have only a billing information system, this one provides information on the hospital's medical equipment, its maintenance due dates and medical data on all patients. A dictionary for diseases is also installed according to an international code of classification.

As to further uses of the computer system, Rasmi says it will enable the hospital to compile useful statistics on the most widespread diseases and viruses in Egypt. Most of the public hospital is devoted to specialisations of internal medicine and surgery. Units of internal medicine comprise upper and lower gastro-intestinal endoscopy, endoscopy for biliary passages, oesophageal sclerotherapy, clinical hematology laboratories with an advanced bone-marrow transplantation unit, and a vascular laboratory, among other facilities.

There are 14 surgery units: seven for general surgery and seven for specialised surgery.

Attached to these surgical units are two recovery rooms with 22 beds. Specialised surgery includes plastic, urological, neurological, endocronological, vascular, orthopedic and ear nose and throat surgeries.

The emergency unit has two surgery units with nine beds, the dialysis unit eight beds and the surgical intensive care unit 24 beds.

The hospital also includes a pharmacy run according to strict standards. A pharmacologist must accompany any physician prescribing a drug. Physicians will call up the required drugs for each patient from the pharmacy through the central computer network.

The medicine will then be distributed by the unit dose system. Mona Farrag, head pharmacologist at the hospital, says the unit dose system prevents the occurrence of both drug waste and misuse by distributing drugs for patient's use per time. Unlike other hospitals, the new Qasr El-Aini hospital has an updated quality control unit which enables pharmacologists to examine drugs and check them against prescribed compositions and expiry dates. "This provides a high measures of safety for hospital patients and enables pharmacologists to conduct research to produce new medicines", Farrag notes.

The pharmacy may generate income for the hospital in the long run. A unit for filling containers with ointment will be used in selling filled ointment tubes to other pharmacies. It also has a pharma- laboratory to measure and detect the percentage of drugs in the blood. Currently, blood transmitted to patients of the hospital comes from the patients' relatives.

 A recruitment programme is in the offing to allow donations from volunteers. "We will also have autologous transfusions whereby blood will be transmitted from patients before they have operations," according to Dr. Faten Moftah, head of the hospital's blood bank. Moreover, the hospital will start "component therapy".