CHU-MEL — Mother & Child Hospital

Context

The Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de la Mère et de l'Enfant Lagune (CHU-MEL) is one of Cotonou's major public health institutions, specialized in obstetrics-gynecology and pediatrics. Promoted to teaching hospital status in February 2022, it operates 318 beds (123 for mothers, 195 for children) and over 700 staff.

Before our involvement, CHU-MEL had no official site — patients, families, and health students had to call for any information on services, consultation hours, or emergency contacts.

The technical challenge

• Multi-service: 20+ poles (maternity, neonatology, general pediatrics, pediatric ER…) each with its own information and team.
• Practitioners directory: photos, specialties, consultation hours, kept up to date.
• Emergency information: on-call numbers updated daily by admin staff, no technical intervention.
• Mobile-first readability: most visitors are families on smartphones, often under stress.

What we shipped

• WordPress site on a custom theme, with an admin interface restricted to genuinely useful fields (no Gutenberg free-for-all to avoid editing accidents by non-technical staff).
• Service and practitioner directory structured as custom post types for easy search.
• Emergency banner editable in 30 seconds by admin to communicate on-call changes or priority info.
• Mobile performance: page weight < 800 KB, LCP < 2s on 3G simulated.

Results

• 20+ services documented on the site.
• 5,000+ monthly unique visitors six months after launch.
• Zero technical intervention on editorial since delivery — the team manages on its own.

What we learned

On an institutional site with a non-technical team, value isn't in feature richness — it's in deliberately narrowing the admin scope. The more buttons editors have, the more they end up breaking something. Our CHU-MEL interface has 12 visible fields. That's it.