The Flying Doctors Society of Africa funds Medical Outreach Programmes in Africa. The objective of this is to treat patients who would not otherwise have access to the care they need and to train local health teams in extremely rural areas to carry out this work themselves in the future.
The Medical Outreach Programmes serve more than 150 rural hospitals in eastern Africa region. FDSA fully finances the Muhimbili Specialist Outreach in Tanzania and partly supports the VVF/Safe Motherhood Outreach program.
Who benefits?
The principle beneficiaries of the Outreach projects are poor disadvantaged patients living in remote rural areas of Eastern Africa, together with their families, and the communities in which they live. It is estimated that 30 million people living in the rural parts of Eastern Africa covered by the services benefit from the programme indirectly.
How the programme works
The Programme takes specialist surgeons to areas where there are no communications, limited medical services and little or no surgical services. We travel to inaccessible areas that can only be reached by plane, where health clinics and hospitals try to support hundreds of people staying in outlaying villages where the only health facility may be a man selling paracetamol in a roadside kiosk.
Emergencies and Natural Calamities
In emergencies, FDSA concentrates on the health aspects and works closely with ministries of health, health facilities operated by other non-governmental organisations and specialised relief agencies. We respond quickly to a broad range of problems such as epidemic disease outbreaks, famine, civil strife with injury and disease, major accidents, flooding and other environmental emergencies. Recent interventions have focused on famine, flooding, cholera, Rift Valley Fever, refugees from Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire, and bomb-blasts in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and Mombasa, as well as humanitarian disasters in the Horn of Africa.
