By Anant Nevatia | Anant Nevatia
It has indeed been overwhelming to receive funds that have allowed us to set up and operate eleven primary health care centres (5 Rural Clinics and 6 Urban Clinics) in across four districts of West Bengal, India reaching out to over 1.1 million people. Each centre runs four departments namely General Medicine, Optometry, Dentistry and Homoeopathy. At the cost of INR 60 ($ 1), patients are provided diagnosis and free medicine for seven days. The centres also provide free spectacles to those in need. Aside of this, each primary health care centre, in collaboration with other organizations, facilitates free cataract and cleft lip/palate surgeries for those in need.
The task at hand is huge and our constant endeavour over the last few years has been to reach out to as many people as we can, by establishing healthcare centres. The need in the current times is to scale up our existing operations to other districts of the state. In order to operate and set up new centres, we require constant funding. The funds would be used for purchasing medical equipment, hiring medical as well as support staff, staff at the Head Office, setting up infrastructure at the clinics, purchasing medicines etc.
As news of patients benefitting from our treatment spreads around to neighbouring villages, the footfall of patients at our clnics is constantly going up, coupled with the fact that government run medical facilities remain sparse. We therefore feel the need to spread out to more areas.
The following is the feedback of a patient who has benefitted from our services.
Kesob: Kesob works as a daily wage labourer on the outskirts of Kolkata. He had been suffering from high fever which prevented him from going to work, resulting in a loss of pay. On approaching one of our centres, the doctors treated him for what they suspected as malaria. Merely two visits to the centres where he was provided diagnosis as well as medication, to reduce the fever and target the virus, put him on the road to recovery. He claims that the services provided by the RHCF centre in particular the patient attitude of the doctors are unmatched for long distances
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
