Kandegedara village in Badulla district is situated about 9 kilometres from the Badulla town and generally it takes about 45 mts to reach the village due to uphill and curved drive. As per govt data, there are about 1000-1500 families living in Kandegedara. The divisional hospital in Kandegedra provides health services to approximately 3,000 families belonging to Sinhala, Muslim, and Tamil communities in Kandegedara as well as from nearby villages.
Badulla was one of the highest hit districts in Sri Lanka by the Ditwa cyclone. Due to heavy rain and wind followed by massive landslides, all access roads to Kandegedara Divisional Hospital were completely cut off. As the threat of the hospital being destroyed and safety of patients as well as hospital staff trapped inside were imminent, authorities decided to evacuate the hospital after clearing one of the access roads. All patients and staff were transferred immediately to Badulla base hospital.
Subsequently, the authorities decided to operate a makeshift hospital at nearby Kandegedara National School. The ground flow of a partially abandoned two storied building was used for this purpose with hardly any basic facilities such as water and sanitation. Due to lack of basic needs, the makeshift hospital was functioning only as a day-hospital serving only out-patients. 15 hospital staff had to travel daily to and from Badulla base hospital to facilitate this operation through the partially repaired road. Villagers of the houses nearby were kind enough to provide them with toilet facilities and other needs.
At the request of the Ministry of Health – Uva Province and the regional director of health services (RDHS), Sarvodaya movement took the initiative to completely renovate this makeshift school building and bring it up to the required standard so that the Divisional hospital could cater limited in-patients at this makeshift facility and medical staff could be stationed 24/7. Work was completed as per the recommendations of the district hospital technical officer and a senior officer from Sarvodaya Head office was stationed in Badulla and given the task to oversee the total operation with the support of Sarvodaya district staff. Constant visits were done by senior management staff including the visit of president of Sarvodaya to monitor progress.
Fully renovated Kandegedara makeshift divisional hospital was handed over back to the ministry of health on 4th of January and now it’s fully functional with in-house medical staff and limited In – patient facilities until government move this facility back to old hospital as per NBRO recommendations or decide on new hospital at a safer location.
