Another day of traveling for Ukweli Test Strips! Today the team, along with the Sickle Cell Diagnostic Team and Safe Motherhood Documentary Team made trips to two different clinics within the Bomboli District: Rokulan and Kalangba. These trips were made in order to talk to more health system employees to better understand the current situation regarding Community Health Workers (CHWs) and how we could implement our test strip into these clinics systems.
Section of the road on the way to the CHCs in Rokulan and Kalangba.
After an hour and a half ride along semi-paved roads, we arrived at Rokulan, an understaffed and undersupplied Community Health Clinic (CHC). At this clinic, we were able to talk to Mister Francis, a Community Health Officer (CHO) for 26 years who is the head CHO of the chiefdom and leader of the chiefdom. During our time with him, we learned that the CHWs working under the Rakulan clinic were still waiting on the quarterly stipends that should have arrived, and often are not supplied the proper devices to effectively do their job. When we asked Francis about preeclamspia in his clinic, he said the location has not dealt with cases, but since the clinic refers any expecting mother with symptoms of preeclampsia to other hospitals, preeclamptic women could have been to the CHC. Despite the zero confirmed preeclampsia cases, Francis seemed very receptive to our UTI and Preeclampsia test strip, and was happy to work with us to train other CHWs at his location. We are planning to come back to the clinic to train the CHWs on how to use our test strip later on in our trip.
Rokulan’s CHC sign with part of the village in the background.
The CHC located in Rokulan.
Our next stop was at Kalangba, a Community Health Clinic that was along the highway back to our hotel from Rokulan. During this visit, we mainly talked to the Community Health Officer and Midwife, but other members of the CHO were present. Similar to the health workers in Rokulan, the workers at Kalangba were very open to us returning to their clinic and training their CHWs, a great sign in the project’s push to expand throughout the Bambali district. The Midwife at the clinic also confirmed that pregnant women have come to the clinic with preeclampsia and many more have shown signs of it, making them even more excited about our test strip being introduced to their clinic.
Images from the Community Health Clinic is Kalangba.
After Rokulan, Ukweli returned back to World Hope International, where we met with Burnadette Udo, a World Hope Worker that has recently moved from the Makeni office to the Freetown office. After sharing more about our project, Mrs. Udo seemed very optimistic about our test strips entering the market, and thinks that our product can eventually successfully make its way into Freetown. After our meeting with Mrs. Udo, we continued our work finalizing our training protocols with Hassan Suri, a World Hope International employee assisting us with our project. Hopefully the training and messaging protocols will be done tomorrow so the team can begin mock training sessions!