🌍 The town and community that host the Uganda Marathon every year is called Masaka.
🏥 The Masaka Regional Referral Hospital serves a catchment area of two million people – both our town, and a huge area of rural Uganda beyond it.
The brave staff here work to save lives. But under-equipped and under-funded, the medics face huge challenges every day. Ahead of much of the the rest of the world, it looks like Uganda is thankfully recovering from the Delta variant surge that hit earlier in the summer.
Inspired by the heroics of the medics who have given so much with such little resource, we wanted to amplify and share some of their stories with you. Welcome to medic week! 👨🏿⚕️👩🏿⚕️🚑
First up, Clinician Auma Winifred:
“I am a frontline worker, trainer about COVID19 in Greater Masaka and a home-based care expert. I have much experience in managing health emergencies.
Now that we are in the third wave of the virus, our admission facilities for COVID 19 patients were full. This risks the lives of patients with different ailments because their spaces are encroached on.
Since treatment for this pandemic is given priority, other patients will suffer for they have no proper place to meet the physician. However, there is a solution to this: we recently received a tent that has a bed capacity of 50 patients.
To put it in good use this facility, some renovations and installations are being made: running water installation, Electricity for lighting and a few sockets for some equipment, and furnishing the floor because otherwise the bare earth is too dusty.
This will waive off the pressure from other wards and will guarantee good care and clinical management of the patients.
All our beds are currently full, and we are having to share PPE equipment amongst doctors and nurses just so we have some protection.
There are 300 staff at Masaka Referral Hospital, of which 200 are doctors and nurses.
PPE equipment supplied to the hospital every month runs out within two weeks causing colleagues to share. Because hospital beds are full, we now want to catch the virus early in people so as we can provide homecare treatment.”
The Uganda Marathon and our partner Eco Brixs are running a funding appeal to provide more PPE and home care equipment to the brilliant staff at the hospital.
We’re happy to have the chance to support clinicians and healthcare workers making a difference. Heroes like Auma.
Next summer we’ll all be able to visit and meet them in person – to thank them for the hard work they’ve done, and to help them and their community rebuild after Covid. All as part of the Uganda Marathon 2022.
For now, we can cheer on and support hero healthcare workers across the globe – a big thank you from all of us!
