Maternity ward for Ugandan mothers

Butogota Health Centre II Maternity Ward

Butogota Parish is located in Kanungu District, in the southwestern part of Uganda in Africa, under Kabale Diocese, 500 km (310 miles) away from Kampala capital city. Our influence area is about 50,000 people, who have access to the services we offer at the health unit.

Butogota Parish started the Health Centre II in 1998, identifying the need of its community who was poor and unable to access health care services. At that time there was only one health centre in the whole subcounty of Kayonza, located in Kanungu district.

The Health Centre staff gets to receive over 1,179 consultations throughout the year. We offer a number of services that include: outpatient and inpatient services, immunization, malnutrition screening, antenatal and post-natal care, normal deliveries, natural family planning, HIV/AIDS and TB care, laboratory service, home visits, distribution of mosquito nets.

Statement of need

The purpose of the fundraising is to build a new and appropriate maternal ward with a 12-bed capacity, next to our actual health unit, which will house all services offered to the mothers. The main challenge we are facing is the capacity of our maternal ward, which only has space for two beds. Our labour ward has space for only one gynaecological bed, which is not enough to cover the demand of pregnant women coming every month to deliver; we receive an average of 11 mothers for deliveries per month. Many clients enrolled in the insurance from the nearest hospital, including even pregnant mothers, prefer to come to our health centre for deliveries, because of our personalized care and treatment to patients.

At the moment, our health centre has only one building which houses all services mentioned above. Sometimes it gets difficult to attend the different needs of the outpatients in one single room, leading to the risk of not properly providing health services.

In addition to this, as per the government of Uganda’s policy by 2020, all health centres II are going to be phased out if they cannot be upgraded to health centre III by having a maternity unit. Despite the precarious conditions of our maternity unit, yet last year (2018), we have managed to attend 37 deliveries and, so far, this year (up to June 2019) we have attended 65 deliveries, which means that, by the end of this year, we would have attended more than 100 deliveries.

The people in our influence area needs the services we offer as health centre, we cannot leave them without these services, by doing so will compromise the health of dozens of mothers and their babies, children and the elderly.

I’m Alejandra H. Girón, a missionary and volunteer nurse at the Health Centre. When I arrived to the Parish and realized of the conditions of the health centre, I decided to start this funding campaign, in order to support people to get more appropiate maternity and health services. Any help would be happily appreciated by the mothers and their babies, if donation is out of your possibilities, please share this with others!

Thanks a lot for your support! :)