Project: do you imagine that with your help we turn a clinic into a small pediatric hospital of reference in Africa?
We are a small Foundation, but we think in big. More than 8 years ago, we began dreaming of offering a worthy health to children that didn’t have access to it. Despite our limited (but not limitating) size and with the help of many people, we started a pediatric hospital in Kenya that has become today is the reference hospital for the whole region.
When you see children becoming blind due to a lack of A vitamin, that simple problems like a wound in a foot become first an infection and after an amputation simply for lack of hygiene or a simple antibiotic, when you see children dying for malnutrition, you just realize how tremendously unfair is not to have any kind of medical assistance.
In 2012 we took in charge the management of “Let Children Have Home”, an orphanage in Meki (Ethiopia). Having assumed the management of the orphanage, we were conscious of the poor sanitary situation in the area. Not even a single doctor for so many population in need!
In April 2012, with a big effort, we inaugurated the Pediatric Clinic “Let Children Have Health”, which allowed us to offer a primary pediatric assistance with limited resources, according to our budget available.
Why do we need to become a pediatric hospital?
Within a few months of inaugurating the clinic, the demand of assistance was higher than what we could attend in our facilities, which forced us to limit our assistance to 1.300 children per month. In fact, we stopped attending everyday many mothers and children who came from distant places and doing a big effort to be able to arrive to our clinic.
Despite the fact that we enabled an observation room for short stays allowing us to attend to urgencies, many patients have a serious pathology that need a longer period in the hospital that we cannot provide with the facilities and the limited human resources we have today.
Nowadays, we derive these patients to Gambo Hospital or to the Black Lion Hospital in Addis Abeba, facilities that are at, approximately, three hours by car, but many of them die on the way to the hospital.
Our project pursuit to have the same success we already had in Lamu (Kenya), an island where 7 years ago we dreamt of a small pediatric clinic that some years after became a reference hospital providing quality pediatric services for the whole region.
What will we reach with your support?
To provide quality pediatric assistance in the hospital to reduce child mortality through:
- Admissions for those patients requiring it.
- Specific units for Renutrition, HIV, physical therapy, etc.
- Offer of new complementary services such as medical subspecialties campaigns with Spanish doctors who travel to the area during their holidays.
- Training to the local personnel to improve his qualification and organizational capacity.
- Health promotion workshops to the public to improve education for health, for example, through basic concepts of hygiene and nutrition for the families of the children coming to the Hospital;
- Fight against child malnutrition and follow-up of the patients in the Renutrition Unit with nutritional complements and applying World Health Organization (WHO) protocols.
Moreover, with your support we will strengthen our regular services:
- External medical consultations in a pre-established schedule.
- Medical urgencies.
- Derivations of patients that, as a result of the complexity of their pathology, need more specialized assistance.
