Home » Community Development Program » 2009 Community Development Projects » Health
Health : Achieving Basic Health Services
In Sumba basic health services are deficient or non-existent. Most Sumbanese must walk five miles or more to get to a government clinic that often will not have the medicines needed to help. In the remote areas of Sumba there are no clinics within a half days walk or more. Many of the government clinics are dilapidated and few have reliable medical supplies or equipment. It really is a desperate situation.
More than half of the Sumbanese children under the age of 5 suffer from malnutrition and anemia due to poor diets making them more susceptible to disease. Tragically in some areas an estimated 30% of the children die before the age of eight of preventable and curable illness.
We are committed to providing improved healthcare for the Sumbanese people. We are doing this by building and operating our own primary care medical and malaria clinics. We also work closely with the government midwife clinics that are stationed in the most remote areas. We provide them with a steady supply of medicines and equipment and our volunteer doctors help improve their skills. We are also continually striving to strengthen the government’s capacity to deliver better healthcare via improved infrastructure and provision of medical supplies and equipment. Through our partnership with Direct Relief International, in 2004 and again in 2006 and 2008, we delivered more than 15 tons of supplies and equipment to three hospitals and 16 government clinics enabling them to better serve their people.
The Foundation’s work in the health sector deals with a variety of needs, these are: the provision of water, providing health services and medical supplies, the rehabilitation of government midwife clinics and the construction of our own medical clinics, and dealing with food security and malnutrition.
In June 2008, we opened two new clinics that we built and staffed. All of our five clinics have been strategically placed about 2 to 3 miles apart to allow for reasonable access for the sick coming from villages nearby.
We employ 13 Indonesian nurses and 1 Indonesian doctor at our clinics and we have an ongoing training program assisted by foreign nurses and doctors that are helping us to improve the diagnostic and treatment skills of our medical team. Our clinics have a reputation as being the best in the area and many people are actually walking miles past government clinics to be treated at ours.
Dramatic improvements in the people’s health are now clearly visible throughout the large area that our network of clinics serve. We will need to employ and train more nurses to staff our clinics. They in turn will need motorcycles to be able to work, and in the clinics more medicines will be required.
Our focus on health services covers three key areas for 2009: