Segal Family Foundation & HopeCore’s New Mobile Health Clinics
A very warm welcome and thank you to our newest partner Segal Family Foundation! With their generous grant, we are able to begin implementing our school-based mobile health clinic program. VHI will partner with 24 primary and secondary schools in the area to provide health education to all students on a variety of topics, including HIV, malaria, nutrition, and dental hygiene. In addition to education, we will provide free health services for children – malaria tests & treatment, typhoid tests & treatment, de-worming medication, growth checks for younger children, and HIV tests for older children. We are very excited to expand our health outreach to children and to provide treatment and medication for those in need.
What sets our mobile clinic apart from other mobile clinics working in Africa is that we are focused on providing patient advocacy and follow-up to vulnerable children who require extended treatment and care. Often mobile clinics will enter a community, provide services for a day and never return. We plan to return to each school every two months and to monitor children at school or at home who require follow-up. For this purpose, we are training Community Health Workers to assist our current Community Health Nurse to visit homes and schools during the two months in between each mobile clinic. These Community Health Workers will be trained to identify and test for malaria, typhoid, worms, and a variety of other common childhood illnesses. With Community Health Workers we will greatly expand the number of children we can reach and improve the quality of care they receive.
The cost-effectiveness of treating children is astounding. For less than $1 we can de-worm a child, $1.50 we can test and treat a child for malaria, and for $2 we can test and treat typhoid. Identifying and curing these diseases will greatly improve the quality of the child’s life and their mental and emotional development. We plan to reach 5,000 children with education and services during 2011, please support VHI in reaching that goal.