A 'Health Supermarket' for Isingiro

from All Africa

The Monitor (Kampala)

By Otushabire Tibyangye
Isingiro

VILLAGE folks in Uganda, particularly western region are used to weekly or monthly markets where they are sure to find all they need.

And for the people of Kabuyanda Sub-county in Isingiro District, the idea has developed into one-stop health centres in form of Health Days where they can get all health services at a go. This is courtesy of the UN Millenium Village Project.

This new concept has gone a long way in easing on the shortage of medical workers and access to health facilities.

"We call it a supermarket of health in our operations to see that local people access medical facilities assembled in one place in one day," Dr Martin Okung says.

Dr Okung is the Health Coordinator of Ruhiira Millennium Village Project in Kabuyanda.

The Millenium Villages Project is a partnership between the Earth Institute at Colombia University and United Nations Development Programme. The project is designed to attain the Millennium development goals particulary those related to health.

Health days have helped the locals to access medical facilities at once. This saves time and financial resources that would have been spent on transport.

Communities are also able to meet various medical workers at a one stop centre.

When journalists recently attended Kigabagaba Health Day, they found different health services were being, offered including family planning, reproductive health, treatment of communicable diseases, nutrition and childcare, immunisation, voluntary HIV testing and counseling.

So far Health Days have been held in 5 parishes of Kabuyanda and the results are enormous. They are held each month per parish on a rotational basis.

"We are very grateful for this kind of arrangement because it has saved us time and money for transport. Everything used to be difficult before the Millennium Project came to our area," a resident, Mr Katuramu said.

Mr Katuramu said if all government departments were working as the Millennium project, the country would move out of poverty faster because of easy access of services by the people.

The Millennium project started in March 2006 in Uganda in Ruhiira village and later expanded to seven villages in Kabuyanda to fulfil the objectives of the eight millennium development goals.

Dr Okung says the project found the area lacking many health services and there was no morale among health workers because people had lost confidence in the health facilities.

But now, Dr Okung is happy that Health Days have largely succeeded because of recruitment of 45 community health workers to handle malaria programmes, personal hygiene and HIV.

Each health worker handles 200 households in monitoring bed nets usage, equipment and health needs. "About 20,000 people are benefiting from the Health days The stalls with the biggest population turn up are usually the children stall, voluntary testing and counseling of HIV stall and nutrition and feeding," according to Dr. Okung. The population covered by the project is about 50,000 persons living under 10,000 households.