J704N Maranatha Health: high quality care & healthy communities

The Situation

Maranatha Health believes all people everywhere deserve to be healthy, and to be able to access high quality, affordable health care. Maranatha Health’s project focusses on the holistic health and wellbeing of communities. Being aware of the limitations of direct service provision – both in terms of how wide the impact can be, and how sustainable it is – it is clear that treating the symptoms of ill health cannot create long-term change: it must be paired with preventing people from getting sick in the first place. Because of this, the project is primarily focused on capacity building: working with other clinics and health service providers in the region to improve their ability to deliver excellent health care (both curative and preventative) to Ugandans.

The Objectives

• Primary Health Care

Maranatha Health run a 35-bed pediatric clinic that provides comprehensive and life-saving treatments that are otherwise inaccessible to many children in Western Uganda. It also serves as a model clinic and training facility, providing a model for excellence in quality of care, health protocols and management systems.. The project offers in and outpatient care, antenatal care, immunisation and HIV clinics, along with laboratory facilities, an operating theatre and a pharmacy. The team of 37+ staff cares for about 1000 patients a month, and the most common conditions treated in children are malaria, diarrhoea, respiratory infections, burns and trauma.

 Earning the trust of the local population is key to delivering these life-saving services. Many clinics deliver low quality services at a very high price, so this project shows people that high quality care can be delivered at a low cost. MH provide a consistently high standard of care and its services are very well received by the community. While meeting the direct healthcare needs of communities is very important, the kind of long-term change this project seeks to achieve