The Clinic at Mwanyama Village, Nkhudzi Bay is Village Foundations (VF) flagship project.
Back when VF first started to operate in the Nkhudzi Bay area, pre-existing buildings that were being left by a charity leaving the area were taken on and re-purposed to open a small rural health post that operated one day a week, seeing up to 50 patients a day from a couple of local villages.
A few years on, VF, renting a house brought the Health Surveillance Assistant into the village to live there in order to step up services, and with the support of clinical officers from Monkey Bay Community Hospital (MBCH), the clinic is now in operation throughout the week, seeing up to 200 patients each time the MBCH team come into Mwanyama. The facility is now being used for health outreach and health screening services and is currently beyond its capacity by a substantial margin.
This exceptional success has led to VF’s biggest undertaking and initiative yet. The Charity has made a formal agreement with Malawi’s Ministry of Health (MoH) to build and operate a dispensary hospital in this rural and remote community, using both government and NGO resources to maximise the impact on the local population.
This Health Centre will provide a dispensing pharmacy, treatment rooms, consultation rooms, wards with beds, a clinical laboratory, minor surgical facilities, walk-in clinic space and more. It also features all the administrative facilities required to run a 24*7 operation including admin office, clinician offices, staff housing, solar power with redundant battery storage, air conditioning in clinical areas and full plumbing for clean water and waste removal.
This Health Centre also provides a space to train the next generation of clinicians and health outreach staff, allowing VF to improve on its healthcare outreach and district nursing projects, enabling delivery of high-quality healthcare across several villages.
In rural and remote communities, people often have no choice and are unable to access any form of healthcare. Access to even a simple course of antibiotics, or even a pack of paracetamol can often cost a family significantly more than a day’s wage, with an overnight stay in hospital costing more than a month’s salary. Because of this, people regularly have no choice but to wait and hope they recover, often dying of common illnesses that are easily curable for less than the price of a cup of coffee in a developed country.
The Village Foundations Health Centre seeks to change this, providing free healthcare to everyone in need, regardless of their ability to pay.