Transit Care

Jan 11, 2008 (LBO) – Sri Lanka's overcrowded top state cancer hospital would get a 140 bed transit facility to house outpatients, the newly launched Colombo branch of a charity focusing on child patients said. Courage, Compassion and Commitment (CCC) Foundation was founded five years ago in Australia to support child patients at the National Cancer Institute (NIC) in Maharagama.

It raised funds to build a pediatric intensive care unit for the NIC in 2005 and a 14 bed children's ward was opened in August 2006, its Sri Lanka branch said in a statement.

Now it is raising funds in Sri Lanka and Australia to build CCC House, a transit home for underprivileged cancer outpatients and their carers.

The CCC House will have capacity for 140 outpatients and 30 carers, and hence will reduce by this number the outpatients who are currently in the hospital wards.

The CCC House will not only give a comfortable bed for those patients forced to sleep in corridors of the hospital (floor patients), but will also allow the medical staff to focus on the newly admitted and critically ill patients, CCC Founder and Chairman Jetha Devapura said in a statement.

"The CCC House will therefore impro