Working at Green Pastures

Well its been seven weeks since I started work at Green Pastures (GP) so its time I let you all know how its going. My background is engineering in the oil and gas industry so as you can imagine trying to fit my experience into a medical environment is a bit like a square peg in a round hole. Fortunately the team at GP are great to work with and I'm enjoying the challenges of working in a totally different field.

So what does a mechanical engineer find to do at a hospital? Well GP has received some substantial funding for development and maintenance from a Finnish donor and a large chunk of my job is to oversee this work. The first few weeks has seen me putting together maintenance schedules for the numerous buildings around the site, creating concept designs for the new out patient department building that we're building and putting the tender together for the detailed design of the building. The current outpatient building at GP is not at all suitable for wheel chair users and other disabled patients which make up most of the patients at GP. The rooms are tiny and there are no proper toilet facilities. So we're building a new building that has nice big rooms with wide doors and wheel chair accessable toilets so that our wheel chair bound patients can recieve treatment without having to worry about how much water they drank before they came. At the moment we're going out for tender for the engineering and architecture of the building, we will hopefully start construction by the end of this year.

The slightly less glamorous side of my job is the donor work. GP is facing a huge budget deficit in the coming year and is desperately searching for funds to fill the gaps so while I haven't been fiddling round with floor plans or budgets I'm searching for new donors. At the moment I'm spending one day a week working in the INF Central office from which most of the donor team are based. So every Friday I cover my laptop in about three plastic bags and stuff it into my backpack and brave the monsoon showers on my bike for the 45 min ride to the Central office on the other side of town.

The entrance to Green Pastures Hospital

At my desk with my workmate Puspha