Women's Health Clinic in Rural Nepal

We are starting a new clinic. Well, it's not a totally new clinic, it's more of an expansion of an existing one. Right now in the town of Madavbesi, which is the nearest town to our farming project known as "Her Farm" (see also on GlobalGiving) a local NGO has a small clinic. Started with some USAID funding the clinic targets sex trade workers for HIV screening, STD screening and counseling services. As Madavbesi is on the main East-West highway that links India and Nepal, there's a fair amount of sex workers in this area. Drivers stop for the night in small lodges along the highway where the working girls practice their trade, a trade that for most is an economic necessity, not a real choice of lifestyle. Needless to say, these places are ripe for the spread of STD's and HIV, which lead to the establishment of the clinic. 

The Mountain Fund is now a partner with this clinic to expand the services offered to include complete medical care for women, not just screening for STD and HIV but full-service health care for the women who visit the clinic. We are investing in an expanded supply of both equipment and medicines needed to offer full health care for women. A hospital in Kathmandu has also agreed to send an OBGYN specialist to the clinic once a week. Hope to have some photos for you soon. Meanwhile I am attaching a photo taken from in front of a show and a lodge in Madavbesi. 

This project will undergo some major changes in the next 30 days. After ten years of starting and operating health clinics in the Rasuwa District of Nepal, we will be transitioning management of our clinics to local control. There comes a time in every project's life-cycle when it is time for donors to exit and allow local communities to go forward on their own and that time has arrived. Clinics and hosptials we've started in the past decade will be under local control. 

That does not mean that Mountain Fund is getting out of healthcare for villages. We will now be working with Helping Hands Hosptial instead. This is a nonprofit hospital and the cheapest hospital in Kathmandu with full-services and all hosptial facilities including ICU, Surgical Theatre and more. 80% of the patients are from the same rural areas where our health clinics are located and we've been referring patients to this hospital for years now. 

Founded by Dr. Gupta Shrestha five years ago, Helping Hands has seen over 250,000 patients and averages 200 a day. The villagers all come here for medical services that we cannot provide in rural settings. Every year Helping Hands provides $30,000 of free, or discounted services to the poor who need lifesaving care and cannot pay for. Our new health mission is to help the hosptial continue to provide that care and expand it's ability to give free or discounted services when it's needed. 

We've seen first hand patients treated in the ER, in the surgical unit and the ICU who would have died without treatment and cannot pay for the treatment that saved them. We've seen a boy from a poor, rural family get free sugery to reset a broken leg that had been broken years earlier and caused the boy to be a cripple. He's walking find now thanks to the hospital. 

So, our rural medicine program is shifting directions and supporting more complicated care for villagers. We hope you'll stay with us and support us in the transition. 

Thank you