Saving smiles in Casablanca: Hôpital Bouafi refurbishment
Operation Smile carries out corrective surgery and care for people with cleft palates and lips around the globe. We’re proud to have partnered with the charity’s Morocco branch to design and construct two clinics: one in Oujda, and another underway in Marrakesh. This year, we will complete a rather different project with Operation Smile - refurbishing one entire floor of a hospital in Casablanca.
In Morocco, getting treatment for a cleft lip or palate can change a child’s life. It can give them access to school, a job, and acceptance in society. Our Director of Projects, Bea Sennewald, explains the situation:
“Parents are often quite worried and can hide the children. We’ve seen that it’s common, especially in rural areas, for a child with a cleft palate to be kept at home because of the stigma. They may not even go to school. Creating clinics also teaches awareness.
“There are many steps that lead up to an operation and a lot of steps afterwards, including getting a child to feed properly or learn how to eat; speech therapy or psychological care. This can go on for months and sometimes years, which is why these clinics are so vital.”
The clinics provide this outpatient care, but Operation Smile also needs large, suitable theatres to perform as many operations as possible when their surgeons visit an area. It was great news when the charity was offered space in Hôpital Bouafi, Casablanca.
The hospital decided that an entire floor could be redesigned to create paediatric surgical space. It could be used for Operation Smile missions as well as children’s intensive care during the rest of the year. The Article 25 team got to work designing the layout, theatres and wards, corridors and waiting rooms that this new space needed.
Every detail matters in hospital design
Article 25 has a strong history of working on medical facilities, with around half of our projects sitting in the healthcare sector. This means we understand the design requirements for sterile medical environments. A hospital refurbishment is a complex project to design and manage - you’re working around patients and doctors who must not be disturbed. You can read more about the specifics of our design here.
When working in hospital design, minute details can make a huge difference to patients’ safety and welfare; from the windows in the corridors to the direction of airflow in the operating theatres.
The practical challenges of building inside a working hospital
This build has been a complicated one to manage. As we are working in an existing building, between two hospital floors, we have to take care when removing anything from the site. We can’t risk cutting off any supply to other parts of the building, so we have to map and reroute pipes and ducts very carefully. Bea describes how good communication between Article 25, the local team and the site architect keeps the project running smoothly:
“Almost every morning, we receive pictures of what the team are doing, and we have an architect who makes sure everything stays on track and gets finished in the end. So, on a project like this, it takes a fair amount of involvement in the construction to keep everybody moving forwards and to make sure nobody deviates from the design. A refurbishment between two floors is tricky. This complex healthcare project management is what Article 25 excels at.”
Changing lives across the Casablanca region
The hospital refurbishment will be finished in 2024, ready for hundreds of children to receive life-changing operations.
We have been working with Operation Smile for some time now and Bea has seen first-hand what a difference their services make to local communities:
“I talked to lots of patients after our first Operation Smile clinic opened. There were children, adults and even small babies. It was lovely - they felt well treated and knew somebody cared about them. I think it's a very hopeful experience. One mother said, my child will have a normal childhood now.”
A brighter future for cleft patients in Morocco
As well as the opening of the hospital in Casablanca, construction will begin in 2024 on a new Operation Smile clinic in Marrakesh. We’re proud to partner such an active organisation and look forward to hearing more stories of transformation from the team.
