St. Mary's Hospital Lacor

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St. Mary's Hospital Lacor, often referred to as Lacor Hospital, is a hospital in Gulu District, northern Uganda. It was founded by Comboni missionaries and is run by the Gulu Catholic Diocese. The hospital is located 6km west of Gulu town, in Gulu Municipality, Bardege subcounty, Opia village. The hospital is one of the best in East Africa.^[1]

During the violent and tyrannical reign of Idi Amin in the 1970s, the hospital was often caught in the crossfire. Throughout the 1980s, the hospital remained at constant risk as thugs repeatedly ransacked the compound, looking for drugs or petrol. Raiders kidnapped staff members and held them for ransom.

Founded in 1959 as a 30-bed hospital, by July 2005 it had 483 beds. It also includes a nursing school and other health worker training programs and peripheral health centers (level III) in Opit and Pabbo with an additional 24 beds. Each day the hospital hosts an average of 600 inpatients and their attendants, as well as 500 outpatients, for a daily total of about 2000. Due to night time attacks and abduction by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army, between 2000 and 10,000 women and children crowd into the hospital compound nightly seeking a safe place to sleep.^[2]

The first surgeons at the hospital were Lucille Teasdale-Corti and Piero Corti, who arrived in 1961.^[3] Teasdale-Corti later died, in 1996, of the AIDS she had contracted from a patient while performing surgery. Other notable employees include Matthew Lukwiya, who was instrumental in containing a 2000 outbreak of Ebola, before succumbing to the disease himself.