Uncategorized Archives - Page 5 of 9

One way to inject hope

March 27, 2024June 22, 2022 by Kinya Kaunjuga

Notice the Unnoticed

By Kinya Kaunjuga

There’s this girl who called me. I don’t know why she did. Maybe because the last time I gave a talk to the addicts she was among them and heard me say they could contact me if they needed help. I have been allowed to remain alive as long as I keep secret the locations where cocaine and heroin are used, bought and sold in our community.

A bewildered reader may wonder how a person living in the slum can afford such expensive drugs. The truth is, they can’t. But they can sell whatever they have, including themselves.

She burns it and injects it. She tells me she is pregnant and wants to stop. That she longs to return to church. She knows she’ll need medical treatment, she heard that in the talks I give. Can the clinic right here in her slum help?

Standing tall and remaining open 24 hours a day; running swiftly and managing to have enough meds to treat all who come through its doors; using BandaGo on a simple laptop; we walk quietly into the clinic that injects hope.

An excerpt from “Conversations with a Black Belt Nurse.”

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and gets it into another clinic

Through BandaGo – our Health Management Information System, technology is actively helping medical clinics continue to provide good healthcare to those living in slums, informal settlements and remote villages. Thank you for being part of this journey with us, we couldn’t do it without you!

You can find out more about Uzima Medical Clinic in this story, We dance.

Kinya Kaunjuga

Kinya brings passion, an infectious laugh and her 15 years of experience in the corporate and non-profit world to Banda Health.

A Texas A&M alumni with a degree in Journalism and Economics, she says, "I love doing things that matter!"

Two heartbeats! Find a car!

July 31, 2023April 28, 2022 by Kinya Kaunjuga

Spaces

By Kinya Kaunjuga

“I feel the need to push,” the woman said. She was still sitting on the chair in the consultation room and I had just recorded a 6 centimeter dilation so how could it be?

As I examined her, I saw little feet. Breech twins! It was an hour and a half to midnight. We didn’t own an ambulance and the patient wouldn’t let us go in search of a car. It was going to be a long night.

When Diana discovered two heartbeats earlier, she had immediately told the patient they would need to get her to the public hospital in the capital city.

In measured breaths but with a steady voice, the patient said, “No. I have heard stories about you. I am in your hands. You will assist me to give birth here!”

Since this was not their first heated discussion about this, Diana and her nurse locked gazes, and in a few seconds the nurse dashed out of the room to get the bed they rotated among deliveries and to boil water.

Concrete stones and steel rods in the unfinished building don’t deter patients from seeking Diana and her team’s care. Despite having to move her clinic, the residents from one slum have followed her to another distant slum for their medical care.

The twins came in perfectly weighing 4lbs 10oz and 4lbs 14oz. The exhausted but delighted mother remarked, “Daktari (doctor), I have two boys already and I asked God to give me girls. I needed these two girls!”

The family was discharged the next day and today they are Space Care’s biggest ambassadors.

Diana and her team use BandaGo to manage their clinical and business operations. She enthusiastically explains, “It has made our work very easy. It has reduced wastage in terms of drugs lost and reduced our workload because it’s paperless. Being the only clinic around this entire place means we had to look up paper records from over a year old. BandaGo worked so perfectly. When Banda came, God came.”

Diana named her clinic Space Care Health Services because she has worked in the slum for many years and is determined to fix the huge gaps (spaces) in provision of good quality healthcare to those who live there.

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic

Thank you for giving to Banda Health. Your donations make it possible to consistently improve our technology solutions which frontline medical clinics like Space Care are using.

We couldn’t do it without you.

Kinya Kaunjuga

Kinya brings passion, an infectious laugh and 15 years of experience in the corporate and non-profit world to Banda Health. A Texas A&M alumni with a degree in Journalism and Economics, she says, "I love doing things that matter!"

Garbage dump clinic

December 9, 2021December 9, 2021 by Kinya Kaunjuga

Ambulances don't come here when it rains, there is no road

By Kinya Kaunjuga

“It’s raining trash! Someone forgot to tie the tarp again!” Julius was shouting to no one in particular as he catapulted from what had seemed to be a mundane sitting position, making a mad dash towards the front of the clinic.

He would later explain that when this happened, he only had a few seconds before the garbage landing in loud thuds above them poured into the clinic’s reception.

It had rained for the past two weeks which meant that no garbage truck had been in sight and nobody was counting on it to get through the muddy ways.

This was when the trash mixed with the heavy black cotton soil. Not only was the garbage truck unable to get through, but no ambulance would come when he called either because they would get stuck.

The only way to capture this story was to listen to Julius in between his responses to staff and patients. As he spoke, I thought, ‘you just can’t make this stuff up.’

He was adamant in one of our conversations and said, “Right now the place is impassable. Kinya, don’t come here. You can’t make it or believe it.”

“We and the people who live here have become used to the garbage. My staff and I hold talks with them to train on how to properly dispose of their trash. We understand that they shifted here from the slums and replicate their habits from living there, which include using flying toilets and dumping garbage. The reason they move here is to change their lives.”

At 24 years old in 2015 and facing the insecurity of the job market, Julius Orenge decided to open a medical clinic in the shanty where he lived. He recalls that there weren’t any health facilities there at all, and the distance to a government hospital was many kilometers away.

“Even till now, the closest large health facility is 31km away in a town called Kitengela which travelling to costs too much for those who live here.”

A shanty is a settlement of improvised buildings. It is squatted and in the beginning lacks adequate infrastructure, proper sanitation, safe water supply, electricity and street drainage. Over time, shanty towns can develop their infrastructure and even change into middle class neighborhoods. They can be small informal settlements or they can house millions of people. The term ‘shanty’ derives from Scottish Gaelic; “sean” (pronounced: shan) meaning ‘old’ and “taigh” meaning ‘house[hold]’.

When speaking to Julius, who is 30 years old now and has run his clinic for 4 years, one senses a dogmatic determination to keep providing good healthcare to those living in hardship. He has just added two beds to make a maternity section in the clinic but prefers to send all primis (first-time mothers) to large hospitals in case of complications which he cannot handle.

“My message to the world is that getting basic primary healthcare is still a big challenge for many people who live in informal settlements, slums and remote villages.”

“Nurses and clinical officers like us are changing that by owning and running small medical clinics deep inside such communities, so the people who live there can access medical treatment close to them.”

“I want the world to help us continue to provide good quality healthcare to people who live deep inside such places. Garbage collectors and their families need medical care too.”

For a long time, Julius has tried to acquire the national health insurance medical provider status in order to help patients pay for their treatment. Getting BandaGo clinical management software is his step towards making that dream come true.

He believes he can help the community learn how to enroll themselves in the national health insurance fund run by the government, and it will help them stop neglecting their healthcare until it is too late.

He gives an example of two children who were brought to the clinic this week by desperate parents who had kept them at home due to lack of money to seek their treatment. The children both had pneumonia and died – it was too late, and there was nothing they could have done.

Julius is one of the BandaGo users who subscribes for a whole year’s membership.

“BandaGo has helped my clinic business to track patient installment payments for amounts as small as 50 Kenya Shillings ($0.44). This allows me to continue treating them with what they can afford to pay.

“BandaGo also helps us track and manage our inventory of medical drugs and supplies. We have been able to see the loss and profit and balance the expenditure.

“We don’t expect to make a lot of profit – my main intention is to give to the health and care of people who live in this community.”

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic

Thank you for giving to Banda Health. Your donations make it possible to consistently improve our technology solutions which frontline medical clinics are using.

Our online clinical management software is addressing numerous daunting barriers to access good primary healthcare for those living in slums, informal settlements and remote villages.

We couldn’t do it without you. Thank you for a year of great impact.

Kinya Kaunjuga

Big wins

March 27, 2024November 29, 2021 by Kinya Kaunjuga

More powerful, more places

By Kinya Kaunjuga

Over the course of the last 3 months, Banda Health used our developer feedback loop – build the technology – measure its value to actual users – learn from what users say and do – and then “went live” with a major new feature in BandaGo which helps frontline medical clinics accurately capture diagnoses and then quickly complete the MOH 705A and B government health registers required in Kenya.

Here’s some of what the clinics had to say!

“Having the MOH 705A and B health registers in BandaGo is awesome. It made me do reports very fast. I was just transferring all the input and my entries instantly to the summary form. Our entries are now more accurate in reporting the coded diagnoses to the government.”
-Boniface Ndamiano, Nurse, Owner and Founder of Bodaki Medical Centre in Kawangware slum, Nairobi, Kenya.

Bodaki Medical Centre’s biggest wins from using the BandaGo clinic management system include a 15% increase in patient volumes due to the increased patient trust inspired by the electronic system. Boniface also now has a quick, improved overview of his business and spends much less time on his reporting.

“BandaGo’s electronic coded diagnosis of health registers MOH 705A and B feature is perfect. Thank you A LOT! I never imagined I would only have to point, click and simply print a completed government health register. I am so happy. This is so exciting to us. No more straining. We are lucky to be with Banda.” -Diana Ayabei, Clinical Officer, Owner and Founder of Space Care Health Services, Nairobi, Kenya.

Diana at Space Care is very motivated by entering coded diagnoses at the point of service and thrilled that she can quickly find a “real diagnosis” to complete patient charts. Their reporting is already 40% more accurate than what they used to do. She is also feeling empowered by the increased patient record confidentiality and security that using BandaGo provides.

Africa covers 6 percent of the earth’s total surface area and 20 percent of the total land area. It has been the fastest-growing part of the world in terms of internet connectivity and usage with exponential growth in the use of mobile phones with digital access. BandaGo, which runs on these digital networks, helps medical clinics without doctors deliver the right treatment right away.

Help us go further

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic

We are thankful for you, because when you give to Banda Health, you are helping us build more powerful innovative technology solutions, and reach more places that need access to good healthcare at the very basic level.

Fun facts and language corner

Banda means hut in Swahili. We chose the name Banda Health because we build technology solutions for medical clinics that are basically bandas (huts, kiosks, booths, and small makeshift spaces) which are found everywhere in Africa. If you look carefully, you can see the banana tree etched in this Banda magnet by the local artisans, who make every piece with a story placed in them. Banana trees are cherished because they can feed a whole village for life.

Kinya Kaunjuga

Kinya brings passion, an infectious laugh and her 15 years of experience in the corporate and non-profit world to her role on Banda Health’s operations team. A Texas A&M alumni with a degree in Journalism and Economics, she says, "I love doing things that matter!"

We dance

April 4, 2024October 28, 2021 by Kinya Kaunjuga

We dance

By Kinya Kaunjuga

Imagine it’s your last $2, you’ve got nine children and your husband recently died.

You’re sick and haven’t been able to go out and work so there’s nothing to eat. Today was especially difficult and it seemed getting up from bed just took too much energy despite putting up a front for the kids almost all day. Taking breaks to catch your breath out of sight so they didn’t notice how weak you felt was easy during the day because you could shoo them out of the house to go play with their friends. But as dusk crept in, the kerosene lamps would need refilling to light the house and the last of the porridge had been eaten yesterday.

You dig out the 200 shillings buried in the mound of soil underneath your bed and clasp the bill in your hand. It seems to choke in your grip like the knot in your chest that is tightly holding back your tears. You clear your throat loudly telling yourself this is not the time to show the children your weakness. They gather around you sensing you’re about to make plans for the evening meal.

Gazing at their faces, you reflect on how all your sons got their father’s wide nose and catch yourself wishing your daughter hadn’t got his broad shoulders. Above his tapered torso, it had given him an irresistible look with the ladies and on her, it provided an unfettered balance to carry twice as many debes as other children when fetching water. This let us have just enough water for washing all her brothers and for drinking when I couldn’t leave the house any longer. God must have a sense of humor.

We were so in love. I was the envy of all the high-school girls when he asked me to be his wife. Not just because he was handsome but everyone in the village knew he came from a hard working family. During long school breaks, parents would send their children to work on his family’s farm to ensure they had a role model to teach them how to till the land, care for animals and raise their own children off the land.

That had been our plan. We would work and live off the portion of land his parents had given him. Nine children had never seemed many when we were together and surrounded by his parents, chickens and stems of maize rustling and swaying in the fields as if their dance could beckon the rain.

And we danced too. At every chance we got, we hummed and sang and ploughed and planted. When he decided to go in search of work in the city, our last crop had completely dried up and there was nothing to harvest due to a prolonged drought.

The tales he told when we spoke on phone were hard to understand because I could not imagine children stealing to get by. Where were their families, I’d ask him? He would explain they didn’t earn enough to feed their children or pay school fees so young boys found ways to survive including crime. Looking back, I had been so shielded from the hardships faced by a lack of income and by a helpless family.

The first time I visited my husband in the city, the bus tout yelling the name of each stop to passengers needn’t have bothered announcing we had reached the slum. With each mile of the journey, the fresh countryside air had been replaced by the pungent stench of human wear and tear, and I realized the hustle and bustle of the city had swallowed the love of my life in its petrifying cost of living.

I was between crisp white sheets and could see a blanket neatly folded at the end of the bed. I thought, my poor children are now orphans – knowing good and well we did not have such bedsheets, let alone a blanket to lavishly spare as a foot rest. As I began to sink into the familiar emotions of grief, I heard the most beautiful sound in all my life, and confirmed that I was indeed in heaven.

The voices seemed to come from deep inside the souls of those singing and I couldn’t help but mouth along with the words. My heart leapt out of the pit I was wallowing in as I carried along with each musical note. “Ameamuka! She’s awake!” Just as suddenly as it had begun, the singing stopped. Someone was shouting. Did they speak Swahili even here in heaven?

Opening my eyes hesitantly, I saw my sons faces peering close to mine and their sister standing behind them, balancing two of her sleeping siblings on each shoulder. Oh those precious strong shoulders. I didn’t know how long I had been there, but that is how I met Uzima White who I call my savior. His medical clinic was my lifeline.

With inaudible instructions from me to go buy food for dinner, the children had rushed to neighbors and asked them for help to take me to hospital. When they reached the only medical clinic in our neighborhood, they offered the owner, White Indimuli, the $2 they had to treat me. Besides treating me for free, he assigned one of his staff to take the children home, and make sure they had a cooked meal that night – and every night for the next many months.

White told me my kidneys were failing and I would no longer be able to work at construction sites doing heavy lifting. Knowing my demise as the sole breadwinner for my children, he offered me a fulltime job as an Askari at the clinic.

For the past four years, I continue to get my medical care from Uzima White Medical Clinic and I have a monthly salary from my employment there. I can pay my children’s school fees and we have plenty of kerosene to light the house and cook every meal. My children say, “Mom, you look so pretty!” One of the boys turns on the little radio in our house, and we dance.

Sound bites

“I did not know my husband had used our land to borrow money and when he was shot by thugs on his way home in the slum, I did not know I would go to live there permanently. My children and I hurried to bury their father and collected the items we could, then moved to his tin house in the city slum, our last available dwelling place. They sold our farm and chased us away.”

“My goal is to get at least one of my children to complete school so they can earn. My dream is to buy land, move up-country with my children and farm on that land. My message to the world is, I am familiar with the grief and trauma of living in a slum. Out of my nine children, five have died. I was suicidal and wanted to kill myself and my remaining 4 children. So whatever you go through, put God first in all you do,” Amida.

“I love White and want him to succeed because of how kind he is to everyone.”

“He helps even street children who have been hit by cars.”

“He tells all of us staff not to tharau (disrespect) anyone in any way; even a madman – if they come in, they are treated with dignity.”

“I’ve worked at Uzima White Clinic since 2015 and during the post-election violence in 2017, they were killing children and mine were at risk because of our tribe; we ran away to the clinic and White gave us a room to live in and hide for that entire time.”

Frontline medical clinics

White Indimuli owns and runs Uzima White Medical Clinic where Amida and Balala (The Black Belt Nurse) are employed.

A frontline medical clinic is the first or second place a person who lives in a slum goes to for medical care.

They began using BandaGo this year and White says, “Before we got BandaGo, we didn’t even know how much we were getting, the number of patients we were serving or how much we spent. But now BandaGo keeps records for us so it is very important because it has really assisted us to realize that we make this, we spend this and now we are happy about this.”

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic!

Through improving BandaGo, technology is actively helping frontline medical clinics continue to provide good healthcare for those living in slums, informal settlements and remote villages.

Thank you for being a part of this journey with us, we couldn’t do it without you!

This story is the fourth and final episode of “Uzima White Clinic – Season One.” Find all the episodes in our Banda Health blog.

Kinya Kaunjuga

Kinya brings passion, an infectious laugh and her 15 years of experience in the corporate and non-profit world to her role on Banda Health’s operations team.

A Texas A&M alumni with a degree in Journalism and Economics, she says, "I love doing things that matter!"

More Time

March 27, 2024September 30, 2021 by Kinya Kaunjuga

More Time

By Kinya Kaunjuga

If you could save lives by giving frontline medical clinics more time to treat more patients, how would you do it? Banda Health asks the healthcare teams who run those clinics.

For instance, recently clinics told us that it takes them an entire day or two to complete just one government monthly report, the MOH 705.

Digging through their large paper registers, categorizing, counting and recording the diagnoses can take up to 16 hours or more each month.

They understand how important the Ministry of Health (MOH) reports are for making evidence-based national health policies but the manual reporting process consumes precious time that can be used to care for patients.

Was there something we could do to speed up that process?

It’s taken Banda two steps to help them solve this challenge.

First, in August our programmers released an upgrade to our system (BandaGo) which makes it easy for clinics to record best practice ‘coded diagnoses’ at every patient visit. So clinics can type common informal spellings of a diagnosis and BandaGo helps them pick the formally recognized right diagnosis code instantly.

Second, our data scientist has created an electronic version of the government report, using the coded diagnoses to automatically generate the MOH 705 on a clinic’s computer. The automated report, once released in BandaGo in the next few weeks, will reduce 16 hours of work to 6 minutes or less every month – depending on how fast the healthcare teams can click!

Every $5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic!

Kinya Kaunjuga

Kinya brings passion, an infectious laugh and her 15 years of experience in the corporate and non-profit world to her role on Banda Health’s operations team.

A Texas A&M alumni with a degree in Journalism and Economics, she says, "I love doing things that matter!"

One way to inject hope

Notice the Unnoticed

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and gets it into another clinic

Kinya Kaunjuga

Two heartbeats! Find a car!

Spaces

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic

Kinya Kaunjuga

Garbage dump clinic

Ambulances don't come here when it rains, there is no road

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic

Kinya Kaunjuga

Big wins

More powerful, more places

Help us go further

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic

Fun facts and language corner

Kinya Kaunjuga

We dance

We dance

Sound bites

Frontline medical clinics

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic!

Kinya Kaunjuga

More Time

More Time

Every $5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic!

Kinya Kaunjuga

Solutions

About

Get Involved

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Legal

Banda Health is a registered 501(c)3 public charity (EIN: 81-3695611).
All US gifts are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Banda Health is committed to financial accountability and transparency.
Take a look at our Financial Statements with Independent Accountants' Review Reports here.

Banda Health | PO Box 63674 | Colorado Springs, CO 80962-3674

© 2019 Banda Health. All Rights Reserved

Notice the Unnoticed

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and gets it into another clinic

Kinya Kaunjuga

Spaces

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic

Kinya Kaunjuga

Ambulances don't come here when it rains, there is no road

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic

Kinya Kaunjuga

More powerful, more places

Help us go further

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic

Fun facts and language corner

Kinya Kaunjuga

We dance

Sound bites

Frontline medical clinics

$5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic!

Kinya Kaunjuga

More Time

Every $5000 helps us improve BandaGo and get it into another clinic!

Kinya Kaunjuga

Get Involved

Contact

Legal

Banda Health is a registered 501(c)3 public charity (EIN: 81-3695611).All US gifts are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Banda Health | PO Box 63674 | Colorado Springs, CO 80962-3674

© 2019 Banda Health. All Rights Reserved

Banda Health is a registered 501(c)3 public charity (EIN: 81-3695611).
All US gifts are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.