Reflecting on the Past Year


Looking back over the past year, it has been amazing to look at the road well-travelled that Project HOPE South Africa has been on. Our clinic celebrated its one year anniversary this month and has gone through some remarkable changes. What we were doing, whilst so good a year ago seems so amateur compared how we run the clinic now!
As I reflect back, it makes me so proud to see how our staff have learnt new skills with limited education and no previous background in working in a clinic. We now have a team that can take blood pressures, run state of the art laboratory equipment to analyze blood results, provide counseling to patients on the various medications that they are taking, manage a pharmacy. The list goes on and on.
Not only that but our list of services is slowly but steadily increasing as our reputation increases. We manage the governments’ case load of diabetic and hypertensive patients in the community. We are able to treat them for all their minor ailments, provide HIV and TB testing, and have recently expanded to provide cervical cancer and prostate screening as well as expanding our family planning services.
On the community side of the program over 7,500 community members in Zandspruit have been screened for diabetes and hypertension. Project HOPE is visible in the community. The word is getting out there and more and more people are turning to us for their health care needs. Challenges still remain. Diabetes and hypertension has not gotten the press that HIV did and many people do not view these diseases as serious, at least not at the beginning when the signs and symptoms as few. We are working hard over the coming months with focus groups to analyze our communications strategy to make sure that we communicate the correct message to the community.
For me it has been an amazing personal journey. Starting this project from the back of my house with an idea, to trying to conceptualize it, and then make it a reality, whilst extremely frustrating and high stress at times, has been totally worth the effort.
So its both sad and exciting for me at the same time to let you know that I have now left South Africa and am starting a similar journey of discovery in the US which I will be no doubt be blogging about.
We have found a wonderful replacement for me here, and the new person will be introduced shortly and will start most likely towards the end of the year. The team appreciates your continued support. Keep checking back and seeing how the program unfolds over the coming months and years. I certainly will be! - Stefan

0 comments:

Post a Comment