By Adrian Gosling | Operations Director
At On Call Africa we really value our volunteers.
Our work is made possible by the amazing people who volunteer with On Call Africa combined with the generosity of wonderful donors who enable them to be resourced to do their job. Every year around 30 volunteers from Zambia and further afield offer their time and skills to help improve access to healthcare in some remote rural villages.
Community health workers from each village consistently offer health advice to local people. They’ve been trained in how to spot signs of serious illness, so they can help people to seek early intervention and treatment. They also assist patients with basic wound management and treating monor ailments. And perhaps most importantly, they pass on important health messages to women and children about staying healthy though good hygiene.
To enable this vital work to continued and strengthen On Call Africa is now recruiting ten more community health volunteers whom we will be training over the next 18 months. The training will be delivered through five residential training weeks in Livingstone. In between these training weeks the community volunteers are given further personalised training and mentoring within their villages. This is delivered by the volunteer doctors, who form part of On Call Africa’s team, working alongside nurses from local rural health centres and colleagues from Livingstone Hospital.
International volunteer doctors form a key element of our work to strengthen local health provision. They are able to provide medical expertise, consultation, treatment and prescription to assist the district health authorities in reaching villages in their catchments with their entitlement to monthly outreach clinics. They report into the district health authorities so that our work is embedded within the existing local systems. We’re delighted that we have a full team of volunteer doctors signed up through to next August.
Over the last 40 months 100 volunteers from Zambia and abroad have volunteered with On Call Africa. It’s almost impossible to quantify the value of what they’ve brought. Suffice to say that if we had to pay for their services our budget would need to be 10 times greater than it is!
Which means that every donation you’ve given has its impact magnified by 10 times.
That’s the value of volunteers.
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