• The hospital board called for bids yesterday and will hold an investor conference on October 30.
• It will be as big as the nearby Nairobi Hospital 350-bed capacity, and the Aga Khan Hospital's 300-bed capacity.
Kenyatta National Hospital is seeking an investor to build a new, 300-bed private hospital in Nairobi.
The project, first announced early last year, will sit on five acres with access to Mbagathi and Hospital roads.
The hospital board called for bids yesterday and will hold an investor conference on October 30.
This will be the first healthcare project undertaken under a public-private partnership in Kenya, where investors build and own a facility for several years to recover their costs and make a profit before transferring it to the State.
In the project status report, KNH said the investor would run the private facility for 30 years.
The project will consist of a minimum 300-bed main hospital, a 40-bed step-down (general bed) facility, a doctor’s plaza, and multi-storey parking that can hold 500 cars.
It will be as big as the nearby Nairobi Hospital, which has a 350-bed capacity, and the Aga Khan Hospital with a 300-bed capacity.
In a notice, KNH acting CEO Evanson Kamuri said although they have provided a reference design of a nine-storey facility, investors will be at liberty to make independent designs.
"The successful bidder will be free to provide services as it sees fit, subject to market demand, provided that the hospital meets the minimum service expectations arising from its Level 6 classification," the CEO said in the project information memorandum, released on Monday.
He said the new hospital will be a specialised centre of excellence to manage life-threatening chronic ‘lifestyle’ diseases.
Services offered will include general practice, internal medicine, transplants, emergency medical services, obstetrics and gynaecology, and psychiatry.
The facility will also offer research and medical training to colleges affiliated to KNH.
The tender is expected to be awarded in September 2021, with construction beginning immediately.
Kamuri said the new hospital will replace the current KNH private wing, which has a bed capacity of 222 and occupies two floors within KNH’s main tower block.
The private wing was established in 1981 and offers better services for market fee-paying patients.
The management says these funds are recouped to support the general hospital.
The plans to expand the private wing ( called the Kenyatta Prime Care Centre) began in March 2012.
It gained momentum in March 2018, when KNH contracted a consortium from Ernst & Young Kenya, India and UK to conduct a feasibility study on the technical configuration, affordability and commercial viability of the project expected to cost billions of shillings.
"The proposed KNH Private hospital is expected to replace KPCC (Kenyatta Prime Care Centre) upon completion, allowing the general hospital to expand its public wards to accommodate additional public patients," Kamuri said.
KNH is the largest referral, teaching and research hospital in Kenya with a capacity of over 2,000 beds, catering for 80,000 in-patients and 500,000 outpatients annually.
"The expanded private hospital will provide Kenyans with more local access to state-of-the-art speciality care hospital, thereby reducing the need to travel abroad. This Project is part of Kenya Vision 2030," KNH said.