ROLE 3 hospital expansion completed in Afghan

Kabul: A construction project to install a new surgical operation room to the ROLE 3 hospital near Kandahar Air Field (KAF) at International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Regional Command South was completed recently.

Australian Captain Phil Baldoni from the ISAF Regional Command South Logistics office who supervised the coordination of the construction said, the expansion was necessary to meet the growing medical needs of the hospital and to continue the ISAF mission of reaching out to offer care to local Afghans.

While the operation room will increase the space in the hospital by about a third, actual output of care is expected to increase by about 50 percent, Baldoni added.

Dutch Major Harm Renes, Operations Chief for the ISAF Regional Command South Engineers who was in charge of construction, said the expansion of ROLE 3 will also help with the care of additional soldiers when American troops arrive in the spring. This is just a continuation of trends were seeing at KAF to make room for the growing number of troops, he said.

The project and its funding is a joint ISAF venture with the nations currently deployed in the south which include Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States. Major Renes could not provide the costs for the ROLE 3 expansion, but said that they are minimal when it comes to the bigger picture of providing quality care to ISAF troops and our local Afghan community.