Projects
Friends of Chitambo (FoCH) has contributed to:
- Three ongoing scholarships that have been established to pay for nurse training for financially disadvantaged students at Chitambo school of nursing.
- Four very-high frequency (VHF) digital radios have been supplied to peripheral clinics to increase communication with the hospital and ambulance base. There have already been instances where this has contributed to saving lives in cases of maternity emergencies, severe malaria and road traffic accidents.
- Books and tablets with downloaded material have been supplied to hospital resource centres and clinics, to help clinicians increase their knowledge and to help with decision-making.
- Ten sets of Emergency Care Guidelines have so far been compiled and distributed to all clinics and ambulances. Some of these have also been adopted by other hospitals in Zambia.
- First Aid training courses have been delivered to front-line clinicians and ambulance drivers. All participants said they very much would use the knowledge and skills from the training and 90% said they very much felt adequately prepared to provide First Aid to victims.
- 16 LifeWraps (devices to reduce blood loss) have been distributed to clinics, the hospital and ambulances. They have already contributed to saving lives in cases of postpartum haemorrhage.
- Friends of Chitambo have pursued establishing a free short-code number for emergency calls to the hospital, which is about to become operational. This has been negotiated with the Zambian Ministry of Health who are treating it as a pilot to eventually be rolled out countrywide.
- Friends of Chitambo enabled a course, to train medical librarians and clinicians as knowledge brokers to support uptake and usage of clinical information in decision-making. Chitambo information officer is among those trained.
- Zambian trustees have presented papers and posters on our projects at various international conferences, including Scottish Government Ministerial visits to Zambia. We are thus contributing to international debates on development-related issues in health care.
