Keeping a children's hospital's IT running
Twelve weeks on the ICT help desk at Gertrude's Children's Hospital in Nairobi, where downtime at the pharmacy or the lab means patients wait.
Where
- Gertrude's Children's Hospital
When
- May – Aug 2026
Role
- ICT Intern, User Support & Help Desk
OutcomeWindows 11 migrations, VoIP cabling, Active Directory support and a telemedicine link to Lamu, all under the Data Protection Act.
The setting
Gertrude's is East Africa's oldest children's hospital: a 100-bed main campus in Muthaiga and around 25 outpatient clinics, all on one centrally managed network. I spent 12 weeks full-time in the ICT department's User Support and Help Desk unit, rotating between the support desk, the hardware lab and network diagnostics.
In a hospital, IT problems aren't abstract. When a pharmacy or billing station drops between 8:30 and 11:00 in the morning, there's a queue of parents and sick children waiting on it.
What I did
- Moved clinical machines to Windows 11 Enterprise. I backed up profiles, did clean installs and sorted out drivers on older hardware.
- Ran and terminated Cat6 cable (T568B), tested every run, and deployed IP phones with their extensions across medical desks.
- Supported staff through Active Directory: locked accounts, expired passwords and organisational-unit changes for outpatient and clinical teams.
- Gave remote support with TightVNC to machines on other floors and at satellite clinics.
- Set up the audio-visual endpoints for DaktariSmart, the telemedicine link that lets specialists in Nairobi consult with patients in Lamu.
- Audited IT stores against the asset database: serial numbers, RAM and storage, machine by machine.
Problems worth telling
Windows 11 broke the label printers. After upgrading older clinical machines, barcode scanners and label printers in the lab stopped talking to them. I tracked down legacy drivers from manufacturers' archives, used alternative installers and compatibility modes, and got the devices working again.
The lab kept losing its printers. Large multi-page jobs were choking the print queue on the lab terminals. Instead of rebooting machines in the middle of a shift, I stopped the print spooler, cleared the corrupted spool files and restarted the service. Printing came back without anyone losing their session.
Peak-hour pressure. The busiest window was also when critical stations failed. I learned to rank tickets by how close they were to patient care, and to work through diagnostics calmly instead of rushing.
Old walls, new cable. Pulling Cat6 through conduits already packed with legacy wiring took fish tapes, cable lubricant and careful teamwork with the network administrator, so that nothing live was disturbed.
Security in practice
The hospital's information security policy follows Kenya's Data Protection Act 2019. Day to day, that meant applying controls on real endpoints: idle screens locking after two minutes, strong password rules on domain accounts, USB storage blocked on clinical machines, and admin rights kept only for people who needed them. It was the first time I saw security as something that keeps patient data safe on a busy Tuesday, rather than a topic in a course.
What I took away
Keeping an organisation running is a mix of troubleshooting, careful asset tracking and talking to people under pressure. That last one surprised me most: listening calmly to a stressed nurse, asking the right diagnostic questions, and explaining the fix without jargon.
I also recommended a few changes: automated network inventory instead of spreadsheets across the 25 clinics, a self-service password reset portal to cut help-desk volume, and short security refresher sessions for new clinical staff.