IT will take another year for the Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital in Joburg to be fully operational.
All areas of the hospital are expected to be available in December 2023.
This was according to the Gauteng Health and Wellness MEC Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko, who said that all areas of the hospital will be ready by next year.
Parts of the hospital went up in flames in April 2021, forcing the hospital to close and patients diverted to nearby hospitals.
Nkomo-Ralehoko said: “The repairs to the fire-damaged area of Blocks 4 and 5 are currently underway. The completion date is estimated at December 2023. There are also smaller work packages such as repairs to columns and beams and construction of shear walls for structural stability.”
The MEC indicated that the fire compliance work in Block 1 to 5 and the admin block related to the non-compliance findings by the City of Johannesburg will continue and this is expected to be completed by early 2026 given the volume of work that needs to be done.
The project managers are in continuous engagements with City of Johannesburg as critical stakeholders to ensure that any issue raised by the municipality is attended to.
“Initially, the approach was to do multiple blocks at the same time, however, the decanting strategy adopted by the clinicians is for all services to remain within the hospital instead of being scattered across other facilities. This means that the decanting will happen on a block-by-block basis with compliance work estimated to be between 6 to 8 months per block.”
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Nkomo-Ralehoko confirmed that the delays in expediting the remedial work were due to several factors which included the transferring of the project between the provincial departments of infrastructure development and health, budgetary constraints and delayed payment of project service providers.
