Keep our Children's Hospital Open

We Value Every Person Who Helps Us Create Change Through love and Happiness

Three-Month Update from Whisper Hospital, Jinja, Uganda

Over the past there to six months, Whisper Hospital has continued to grow, strengthen its services, and work towards becoming a more sustainable healthcare facility for the children and families who depend on us.

Above all, we want to begin this update with gratitude.

Every donation, every person who shares our work, and every individual who believes in our mission contributes to the change happening here. Whether a contribution is large or small, it becomes part of something much bigger: providing healthcare, saving lives, preventing illness, and giving vulnerable families access to care when they need it most.

Our mission remains simple and deeply important to us: changing healthcare through love and happiness.

Building a More Sustainable Hospital

One of our most important developments during the past six months has been strengthening the financial sustainability of Whisper Hospital.

We have expanded the number of health insurance providers accepted at our hospital, allowing more insured patients to access our services.

This is an important step for our future.

While donations remain extremely valuable, particularly for our free and subsidized programmes, we do not want the hospital’s survival to depend entirely on charitable contributions. By increasing the number of insured and paying patients we serve, we are creating a healthier balance between income-generating healthcare services and charitable healthcare programmes.

Our goal is to build a hospital capable of supporting itself while continuing to protect those children and families who simply cannot afford the care they need.

Strengthening Paediatric, NICU and Intensive Care Services

We also continue to invest in the quality of our clinical services, particularly our paediatric, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), and intensive care services for critically ill children.

These departments care for some of our most vulnerable patients.

Our team continues working to improve equipment, clinical standards, staff capacity and the overall quality of care available to children who require more intensive medical support.

For us, sustainability is not simply about keeping the doors of the hospital open. It is about continually improving the standard of healthcare available behind those doors.

Around 50 Sickle Cell Patients Receiving Free Care Every Week

Our free weekly sickle cell clinic remains one of the programmes closest to our hearts.

Approximately 50 patients attend the clinic every week, receiving services completely free of charge.

We continue providing preventative medicines for children living with sickle cell disease because regular medication and monitoring can help prevent serious complications and reduce the number of medical emergencies these children experience.

When children become severely unwell and require hospital admission or blood transfusion, we continue supporting families through subsidized admission costs, helping make lifesaving treatment more accessible.

This programme would be extremely difficult to sustain without the generosity of people who continue supporting our work.

A Major Investment in Water Security

One of our biggest infrastructure challenges recently has been something every hospital depends upon every minute of every day: water.

Jinja is growing rapidly, with significant economic expansion, construction and new developments taking place across the town. At the same time, we have experienced serious challenges with the reliability and pressure of the municipal water supply.

For a hospital, unreliable water is not simply an inconvenience.

Water is essential for infection prevention, cleaning, sanitation, patient care, maternity services, laboratory operations and the everyday safe functioning of a healthcare facility.

We therefore made the decision to invest in significantly increasing our water-storage capacity.

Last month, Whisper Hospital purchased two large water tanks at a total cost of UGX 10,000,000 — approximately US$2,695 / £1,990.

If divided equally between the two tanks, this represents approximately UGX 5,000,000 (US$1,348 / £995) per tank.

This was a substantial investment for our hospital, and your donations and support helped us make it possible.

The tanks will provide us with much greater water-storage capacity and help protect the hospital from interruptions when municipal water pressure is insufficient.

The Tanks Are Here — Now We Need to Connect Them

Purchasing the tanks, however, is only the first part of the project.

They are currently not yet connected because we still need to construct the supporting stands and complete the plumbing and connections necessary to integrate them into the hospital’s water system.

We estimate that completing this next stage will cost approximately UGX 6,000,000 — around US$1,617 / £1,194.

For a charitable hospital, this is another significant expense, and we are currently trying to save and raise the funds necessary to complete the work.

Once completed, this project will give Whisper Hospital a much more reliable reserve of water and strengthen our ability to operate safely even when the local supply becomes unreliable.

This may not be the most glamorous hospital project, but it is one of the most essential.

Our Next Infrastructure Priority: Expanding the Car Park

Another area we hope to address is the expansion and improvement of our hospital car park.

As the hospital grows and more patients, families, ambulances, staff and visitors use the facility, we need to improve the space surrounding the hospital so that access remains safe and practical.

This forms part of our wider effort to strengthen the hospital’s infrastructure alongside our clinical development.

Finding the Balance Between Charity and Sustainability

The past six months have reminded us that building a sustainable charitable hospital requires balance.

We must continue providing free and subsidized healthcare to vulnerable children and families while simultaneously developing services that generate enough income to keep the hospital functioning.

We must invest in doctors, nurses, medicines and medical equipment while also paying attention to less visible necessities such as water systems, infrastructure, electricity, maintenance and safe access to the hospital.

Every improvement strengthens the foundation upon which our charitable programmes depend.

Our goal is not simply to help people today. Our goal is to build something capable of continuing to help people for many years to come.

Thank You for Being Part of This Journey

To every person who has donated to Whisper Hospital through GlobalGiving, supported our work, shared our story or simply believed that children deserve access to compassionate healthcare:

Thank you.

Your contribution becomes medicine.

It becomes a blood transfusion for a child with sickle cell disease.

It becomes care for a premature baby.

It becomes treatment for a critically ill child.

It becomes water flowing through a hospital when the municipal supply cannot provide enough.

And ultimately, it becomes another opportunity for someone to receive the care they need.

There is still so much we want to improve, and there will always be another challenge ahead of us. But when we look at how far Whisper Hospital has come, we know that none of it has happened alone.

Every single person who supports us becomes part of the change we are creating through healthcare, life and happiness.

With gratitude,

Veronika Cejpkova and the Whisper Hospital Team
Jinja, Uganda