Health
When healthcare volunteers on Village Life’s first delegation to Tanzania set up their mobile field clinics, many local villagers had never seen a doctor in their lives.
Volunteers quickly realized that the limited medical supplies could only help a few, while masses of sick villagers still waited hours on end in the heat in hopes of getting some relief.
Comprised of students, faculty, and professionals, including many from the University of Cincinnati’s Academic Health Center, the Health Committee provides the foundation for Village Life’s efforts to improve acute and preventive health care.
Laying Out Long-Term Healthcare
Village leaders identified malaria, life-threatening diarrhea from worm and parasite infestations, and severe malnutrition as the major health problems among villagers. Village Life’s Health Committee had a tall task to tackle with long-term healthcare in the area. How do we do it?
- Host mobile field clinics that treat thousands of people: Field clinics allow us to treat immediate illness and offer long term solutions for care, creating a healthier population in our target villages
- Build the Roche Health Center: The doors of our center opened in 2011, providing more than 20,000 villagers with their first ever access to permanent healthcare.
- Initiating rapid diagnostic testing for malaria to improve the accuracy of treatment, and continuing to focus on malaria prevention: Since Village Life’s inception, we have distributed more than 13,000 life-saving bed nets.
We know there are limitations to our work
We need to make sure healthcare continues to be delivered once we leave the villages. We’ve set up infrastructure to do so, but it’s still a work in progress. As we come together, we make progress:
- More than 14,000 patients treated in mobile field clinics
- Thousands of children fed daily in our nutrition project and immunized at roche health center
- Thousands of cases of malaria and schistosomiasis prevented
- Scores of expectant mothers given a chance for a healthier delivery
