Outreach for vital health services in rural Kenya

You kindly offered a gift towards our work in Kenya and so I thought you would like to know what we are doing with that gift - and how we are making it work to save lives.  

Our Outreach Teams are offering health to nearly half a million men, women and children in Turkana, in the north west of the country. Working with Merlin nutrition staff, the teams offer primary health care and back up, to the nutrition teams as the food crisis in East Africa continues.  

Merlin staff will still be there through out the Holiday season, offering care, love and support.  If you are able, please consider offering another gift to this project, thank you.

In North, South & Central Turkana, Merlin is now working at 76 outreach sites (these are temporary sites where our teams set up mobile clinics for one or two days at a time) and 33 health facilities.

By the start of October;

• Merlin had helped to screen over 8,000 children for malnutrition.
• Sadly, more than a 1,000 of those were severely malnourished and had to be placed within our intensive care feeding programmes.
• Merlin are now offering a supplementary feeding program to all families in the areas where we work, distributing food supplements to around 10,000 children and pregnant women.
• Merlin is supporting health workers in 4 nutrition stabilisation units to provide 24-hour care for severely malnourished children with medical complications – such as chest infections, and children with TB (tuberculosis) or HIV/ AIDS.
• More than 600 children have been vaccinated for measles.
• Solar refrigerators have been installed in 9 health facilities for safe vaccine storage, enabling Merlin staff to start operating much bigger vaccination programmes.  The result, to offer even more children protection against the five most common childhood killer diseases – polio, diphtheria, whopping cough, tetanus and measles.
• Water filters have been distributed to health facilities.

 Merlin is offering direct access to health care for more than 485,000 men, women and children.

Links:

• Read more about our work in Kenya