ENTEPESI, Kajiado, Sep 1 — Before health workers started coming to her village, Sarah Naisoi Songoi knew that getting medical care meant a journey.

📻 Breaking It Down

The nearest health facility is about 10 kilometres away. For families living in remote communities across the greater Amboseli landscape, that distance can turn a routine clinic visit into a difficult undertaking.

For pregnant women, mothers with young children and people who need regular treatment, distance can determine whether they receive care at all.

“Life was very difficult because the distance was far. It could take us hours to get to the nearest hospital,” Songoi said.

📌 What You Need to Know

Another resident, Sokoiyan Partet, said the initiative had helped bridge the healthcare gap while giving communities vital information about their health.

Now, the journey is beginning to work in the opposite direction.

Instead of patients travelling long distances to reach a health facility, healthcare workers are travelling into the villages.

What began in 2022 as a “backpack nurses” initiative, in which individual nurses travelled by motorcycle carrying medicines and basic medical equipment, is now being expanded into a more ambitious mobile clinic model.

Big Life Foundation launched the expanded integrated health outreach programme in August, bringing multidisciplinary health teams into remote communities using four-wheel-drive vehicles.

The new teams will travel to villages up to 60 kilometres from existing health services, bringing antenatal care, ultrasound scans, malaria and HIV testing, cervical cancer screening, and other diagnostic and treatment services closer to people who might otherwise spend hours travelling to a health facility.

📰 Source: Capital FM Kenya