Black Lion Hospital: Addis Ababa

Black Lion

The largest hospital in all of Ethiopia is Black Lion. I again was granted unlimited access to video and photograph the conditions of this public facility. Black Lion is the last referral hospital in Ethiopia, if your illness requires more care then what they can offer, the next place you will go is Nairobi, Kenya and from there to South Africa. This hospital sees approximately 370,000- 400,000 patients a year but the exact number is not known. They have 800 beds, with 130 specialists, 50 non-teaching doctors. This is the largest teaching hospital for the University of Addis Medical School in Ethiopia, so there are about 350 Residents and 600 Interns. The emergency department sees around 80,000 patients a year and they just started a new trauma unit in the recent months. This hospital is a government runs hospital and with hundreds of staff and personal, I expected to find this facility in much better shape. I did not.

I was very pleased to meet with the Medical Director Dr. Daniels, head of the entire facility. He was warm and welcoming but he offered me the same word of caution about how many come through the hospital but are never seen again since the problems are so overwhelming. Again, we were extremely luck to actually videotape the conditions of the hospital because most times the government does not want this out to the public. To be honest even with the stamp of approval of the Medical Director and the Health officials, ward after ward we would have to call the head of security to get them to talk to the head of that department to let us in to film.

What is interesting is that, an American from Chicago is who contracted through John Hopkins to be the Bio Medical Engineer there, took us on the tour and she specifically asked the Medical Director were there any areas off limits and he said no. She was very happy to show us all the areas and many are most disturbing. One of the biggest problems again is all the waste that literally sits everywhere. Equipment once again that comes without instruction manuals, broken, label for parts only (which mean you would have to have the exact piece of equipment which never happens) and just the array of metal, and wood and old boilers, generator, autoclaves that sit Mold all over the ceilings and walls for years because there is no proper way to get rid of it.

The stacks of scrape metal and wood sit in huge piles and you would think that some of this could be sold to generate money for the hospital but because it is a government facility everything has to be logged and check in order to insure no one is making a profit individually. So it sits, everywhere, taking up valuable space in a facility that is way over crowded. They do try to reuse and repurpose things but it is too much, they are drowning in all the waste everywhere.

In the boiler room I counted three huge boilers plus one outside that were completely broken, currently there is only one working. The only place in the hospital that has hot water is the laundry room with has no working dyers, so every piece of laundry for 800 beds has to be hung to dry. The hospital has not had hot water for over 8 years. This city hospital is better off then the rural ones because it does have running water indoors. Honestly though they have no idea how long the last Scrape Metal boiler will hold out before the water will not be able to be pumped out to the hospital. Currently the top floors of the hospital receive no water since the one boiler is not strong enough to push the water that far.

It pretty much is the same for the generator. Sine there is a power shortage; the generator is used every other day to provide power for the entire hospital. There is a concern with it’s over use the generator will not last long and then they will be powerless. There is an old German made generator from the 50’s that still sits there but has not been used in decades.

The most disturbing things were to see the black mold growing on the walls everywhere. It is well documented that mold make a person sick and here it was everywhere but worst it was on the ceilings and walls of the kitchen. So the stream rises from the food and the mold literally drips from the ceiling into the pots of the meals prepared from over 1000 people daily. It was horrible. They know it is a problem and they had in the budget to start Wood piles.. of broken furniture a need kitchen but when is the issue???


Black Lion only has one working autoclave to sterilize instruments, out of 3 large ones that are just sitting next to each other. Another amazing things is that each day the nurses hand roll thousands of bandages for patient use, since they do not have a sterile package bandage, they can use. So bandages are just sitting around on table, and everywhere else as nurses package them by hand. With lack of resources in these hospitals infection control goes right out the window.