BEIT Cure Hospital yesterday launched a mobile Ear Nose and Throat (ENT) clinic, which is aimed at providing services to the rural poor who cannot afford to travel to Lusaka for specialised medical services.
Executive director Peter Kyalo said in Lusaka yesterday many patients who needed services provided by Beit Cure were either ignorant about the hospital or were too poor to travel to Lusaka for treatment.
He said that the hospital had treated many patients through both house and mobile clinics but he was hopeful that ENT mobile clinic would further help to provide specialised services to the poor.
“Through our mobile clinics, we see very needy patients and sometimes they are just too poor to come to Lusaka.
“ I am, therefore, happy that we can now provide services through this mobile unit and make healthcare accessible to all deserving Zambians,” said Mr Kyalo.
Beit Cure Hospital had been using mobile clinics for most of its outreach programmes and the newly commissioned mobile clinic, which was equipped with modern specialised equipment, would attend to patients with ENT complications.
He said Beit Cure had performed 4,392 surgeries, provided consultancy to 7,584 people and performed 423 clinics in different regions of the country.
And Health Minister Kapembwa Simbao has implored Zambians to embrace mobile clinics as they have a potential of cushioning the demand on static hospitals and offering specialised treatment for many Zambians in rural areas.
Speaking when he officially commissioned the ENT Mobile Clinic, he said Zambians were not sure what mobile clinics meant in Zambia and hence the confusion.
Mr Simbao said it was not a secret that mobile clinics had done so much for the people of Zambia especially the poor who were in the majority in rural areas.
He said lack of finances denied a lot of the rural population an opportunity to access health facilities and the real solution to this situation was the introduction of mobile clinics which would draw health services closer to the people.
He commended Beit Cure Hospital of taking a leading role in using mobile clinics to provide services to patients in rural areas on a free charge.
And Beit Cure hospital Board chairperson Larry Kalala called on the private sector to partner with Government and his institution in ensuring that more children accessed specialized health care.
Mr Kalala said the hospital had experienced fiscal challenges with the decline of the United States and the Global economies and the hospital had been notified by a few foundations that they would not be making new grants in the in the coming next 12 months as they take time to access their own financial health.
“A few of our major donors have also indicated that they will need to reduce their contributions. But in light of the challenges, GORTA took it upon themselves to provide the ENT mobile clinic, which we are commissioning today,” he said.
[Times of Zambia]
Mobile Clinics are simply a political platform with the party in power misapplying resources. Take any developed nation & see if mobile service has been the solution? They may play a small complimentary role but not the backbone! The economics are flawed. Limiting factor will be mobility itself. The vehicles don’t run on air, so ever increasing prices of fuel, even a grade 1 pupil will tell you what that implies in the longrun. The vehicles need to be serviced, you don’t just commission them & then forget. Their rate of depreciation & thus cost of replacement will be stratospheric in their gradients! If this govt has had all this money to dish around, why haven’t they turned the current health system around? It’s not like the rural population has suddenely ballooned overnight! It’s…
…all about how to lay ones dirty fingers in finances that are available & falsely justifying the expense, becos afterall we all know vehicles are expensive to buy, more so if specialised. There certainly be lots of kickbacks along the chain, from acquisition, to fuel supply & maintenance. How worker friendly will it be for the staff who will be expected to man them day & night away from their homes. It will mean accomodation & food & per diem payments for them. For the system to be cost effective, it will have to be active or on the road daily, similiar to airlines, whose cost effectiveness is only achieved if planes are airborne than sitting on the runway!! We are really backing up the wrong tree – is it any surprise we are going backwards?? No production but just consumption, God help!
Ba Kamwendo you are thick headed.
#1, and 2 if you not sure about something better yuo keep read and learn dont have to contribute to everything exposing your ignorance. beit cure is helping ent patients that is ear nose and throat but we need mobile hospitals to cover all areas like fibroids, cancers in women, prostate glands, cataracts, ultra sound, xray, dental, surgery, heart diseases. not everyone from villages can afford to travel to UTH for specialist treament to be seen by topnotch gynaecologist Dr kaseba sata wife of king cobra but with mobile clinics she will be able to travel to remote areas to go and provide treament
I THINK IT IS COST EFFECTIVE FOR A GP OR SURGEON TO GO AND MEET 50 + CLIENTS THAN HAVE THESE 50+ CLIENTS TRAVELLING TO MEET UP THE GP/OR SURGEON IN LUSAKA OR AT A GENERAL HOSPITAL. LETS BE REALISTIC. JUST BECAUSE THE POST APPEARS NOT TO FAVOUR THE IDEA DOES NOT MAKE IT A MISPLACED IDEA. MANY LIVES COULD BE SAVED OR NORMALISED THROUGH THESE FACILITIES ESPECIALLY THE UNDERPRIVILEDGED. LETSNOT BE SELFISH ZAMBIANS BASED IN LUSAKA. WE SHOULD CONSIDER OUR FRIENDS WHO ARE FAR AND WIDE ACROSS THIS COUNTRY
Beit Cure Hosp[ital is a charitable NGO Hospital. So, why is there oppopsition to mobile hospitals when government wants to use them but there is cheering when a private hospital does? What is good for the goose must be good for the gander.
I read Henriott’s piece on mobile hospitals in The Post the other day, and I realised that Zambia has a problem There are people who will oppose at any cost and as long as they do not like the people in government they will oppose anything. Doubtless, he posed interesting questions, but it is terribly patronising to think that the experts at the Ministry of Health, the technocrats in Health care and the union could not have thought about these problems but a Roman Catholic Priest with a column in The Post is cleverer and he has done the home work! There are thousands of Zambians who need ‘day care’ surgery, but cannot have it because it is expensive to travel 500 miles just to have a simple surgical procedure. One would need accomodation as well. Please think of these people.
In the long run, it would be better to build more permanent hospitals and refurbish the existing ones. But what some danda heads do not realise is that there is a dearth of medical staffing in Zambia and the whole world really! UK doctors do telemedicine for Australian hospitals and vice versa, Indians for US. Zambia can share the few specialised staff among the 9 provinces. These can then arrange for serious cases to be transferred to UTH. Minor surgical procedures can alleviate discomfort. Take arthroscopy for example. This can be done in a jiffy, patient in Shangombo, returns to this house and in a week or so is back in the fields. Going to UTH may keep him off work for a month!
There is a huge element of partisan leaning on many subjects and this clouds the thinking of many. If you go to an area that does not have a network(MTN, Zain or Cell-Z) you will not enjoy the benefit of using a mobile phone. Similarly if you live in an area without a good road network you will not enjoy the benefit of the mobile clinics, its that simple. Is it reasonable to go this route when our road network only goes upto provincial headquarters which have hospitals and clinics in place? Playing poker with people’s lives.
Saint i agree with you It is said that inorder to achieve anything new there is need to do something new. If we want to. improev any service their is need to attempt new innovative ways of achieving that objective, this is basic maanagement practise. Sometimes it will work sometimes it wont. The government has made a decision to supplement the present facilities with mobile clinics and i can see many ways in which this can help the health sector.
#4 & #5 I THINK U ARE WRONG IN THINKING ZAMBIANS HATE MOBILE HOSPITALS.THE MAIN CONCERN FOR ZAMBIANS IS THE COST OF THOSE HOSPITALS(USD 59 MILLION) COMPARED TO IMPROVING/UPGRADING RURAL HEALTH CENTRES AND SECONDLY MOST ZAMBIANS KNOW THAT THE EXITING RURAL HEALTH CENTERS HAVE NO QUALIFIED MEDICAL PERSONEL TO MAN THEM SO WHERE IS THE GOVERNMENT GOING TO FIND THESE MOBILE DOCTORS AND NURSES AND THIRDLY HOW THESE POLITICIANS EXPECT TO MEET THE COSTS OF RUNNING AND MAINTAINING THESE HOSPITALS WHEN WE FAIL TO EVEN JUST PAINT THE ALREADY EXISTING ONES IS DOUBTFUL BECAUSE WE KNOW OUR LEADERS ,ONCE THEY GET THEIR CUTS THEY WILL FORGET ABOUT THE RURAL POPULACE THEY ARE NOW CLAIMING TO LOVE.
good points Squealer and ICEBERG
It is certainly obvious to discern who the thick heads are, surely displaying their inability to utilise the “half” neuron( i.e. half a brain cell!!) that occupies their cranium(i.e. skull) to analyse my comments. I have at no point disparaged the efforts of Beit Cure, but rather that of MOH & govt. pretending to address a grossly inadequate health system, just prior to elections. Obviously we have lots of poor Zambians who have been condemned to their current predicament by the same pretentious govt who want to show they care. Mobile Hosp will only serve None-Life saving ailments which indeed pts can cope with for a while, & have been serviced by flying doctors & local clinics which are so neglected. The economics & logistics enumerated by myself & others will soon be borne out!