Mobile Antenatal and Mother and Child Clinic

We conducted a Mobile Clinic around the villages between January 21st and 26th, 2009, for expecting women, nursing mothers and children, in collaboration with a Japanese midwife nurse and medical staff from Kompong Seila District health center.

This project was made possible thanks to the generous funding by OHDAKE Foundation through the NGO Side By Side International.

The mobile clinic toured four villages and provided health check and medical treatment for over 120 outpatients.

There are many villages located very far from any health institute. When we visited these villages, we met many pregnant women who had never attended antenatal clinic before. We did basic check-ups, distributed iron tablets and provided consultation services and medical advice.

Our objectives for this mobile clinic attempt were three-fold:

1. To provide health care to economically or geographically vulnerable pregnant women
2. To collect medical data while touring the villages, in order to help Graphis Health Center better assess the situation and needs of the local population.
3. To establish an effective communication and collaboration network with Kompong Seila District’s Health Center, which is currently the largest public health institute in the district.
   

The Road to the Health Center

The Graphis Health Center currently under construction is located 8 km from the National Road No. 4.

Why didn’t we build the health center along the National Road itself?

The main reason is we didn’t want to create additional accidents from more traffic that the health center would inevitably generate. Once the health center opens, it would inevitably attract many people, coming in and out of the center, walking across the road, erecting food stalls around and so on. If the health center were located along the already busy and accident-heavy National Road No. 4, it would become an additional cause of traffic accidents.

We decided therefore to build the center a little bit away from the main road, but not too far so as to be able to drive emergency patients quickly from the main road.

Up till now, the existing road branching out from National Road No. 4 to the health center was quite rough. It took at least 25 minutes to drive from the main road to the health center on this dirt road.

Now, with the support from GRAPHIS, a Japanese students group, as well as from local authorities, we have started to repair the road section to the health center, to ensure quicker and safe access.

Local authorities are providing heavy machinery such as excavators, shovel car and trucks, as well as workers. GRAPHIS provided the funds to cover all the costs, including fuel, workers’ food and other expenses.

Thanks to their generous contribution, we have started the repair work of the road section on December 23, 2008.

Once the road repair is completed, travel time from National Road No. 4 to the health center will be reduced from 25 minutes to only 5 minutes!