MARTHA PRIMARY HEALTH CARE CENTRE

YEI, SOUTH SUDAN

“In South Sudan, a girl is more likely to die in childbirth than to complete her primary education” (UNICEF 2005)

 

South Sudan is experiencing peace for the first time in 20 years. The infrastructure is slowly being redeveloped. Diseases, often preventable, are rife, health services are poor and in many places absent.

 

The clinic building in June 2006 was in a poor building and had little furniture and inadequate storage facilities. The waiting room had few seats, the laboratory had little equipment, and there were only three members of staff, a cleaner, an untrained dispensary assistant, and a laboratory technician.

 

A UK charity, African Revival, was very generous to Martha Clinic, once these needs were explained to them. With thanks to African Revival, we were able to redecorate the clinic (below), to have storage cupboards made, to tile the laboratory (see left before improvements), to provide new diagnostic equipment, new benches for waiting patients, and supplied considerable stocks of much needed medicines.

 

African Revival paid for some new staff to be employed, including a translator for Poppy so she could carry out patient consultations.

 

 

 

In 2007, we carried out a community health survey by paying for staff and investing in three bicycles to ease the process. This survey was very useful in helping us understand the health needs of the local population and following it we developed a health education programme.

 

The health education programme used radio, puppet theatre and teaching in the clinic and community to address the needs found and included malaria net distribution.

 

 

Community Survey Interviewing (left) and teaching sessions about malaria (right)

 

 

During 2007, a large grant was received from Irish Aid, which enabled us to build a new high quality building next door to the old building, as well as employ and train several more staff.

 

We are very grateful to Robin Fox, a young man who did a sponsored triathlon in aid of building a large waiting room to accommodate our rising number of patients - now nearly 3000 each month.

 

 

 

 

The old building is now in use as a preventative centre. The services in this building include HIV/AIDS testing and counselling, trauma counselling, and ante-natal clinics.

 

Recently added has been a comprehensive child immunisation service thanks to a joint gift by African Revival and the Diocese of Salisbury of a solar powered vaccine storage fridge. 

 

We are now expanding our health education and three of the staff were able to attend a two-week training in Community Health Evangelism.

 

 

In the future we hope to be able to develop a mobile health service to offer a service and reach out to communities around Yei where there is no healthcare provision.  We are also hoping to find funding for another clinic two hours away by road towards Uganda. 

 

We have just received funding from Irish Aid to develop another Primary Health Care Centre in Lainya.  Lainya is about 40 miles from Yei on the Yei to Juba road and is an adjoining Diocese to Yei.  We hope that work on constructing the new clinic will start in November 2008.