Mobile clinic visits NC school
MORE than 200 pupils from Rietrivier Primary School in Ritchie received dental and eye-care screening provided by the Bophelong Mobile Health Care Clinic.
The mobile health clinics provide dental and eye-care services, as well as general health check-ups, in four provinces - Mpumalanga, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal and the Free State - and for the first time the services reached Northern Cape last week Thursday.
The mobile clinics travel to communities that have an urgent need for health care and don’t have access to such services.
They started offering services in 2014.
The initiative was birthed by the Eskom Development Foundation, which partnered with the Department of Health and Basic Education.
More recently, in an effort to take health care to the heart of remote communities, Eskom’s mobile health clinics and Transnet’s Phelophepa train now collaborate to offer a joint health service.
Klaas Gouws, the acting general manager of the Northern Cape operating unit said that this initiative was formed after realising that most children live in poverty in South Africa.
“According to the data from the latest living conditions survey, there’s an estimated 13 million children that are living in poverty in our country. A further study on the data has revealed that about 80 percent of these children will never visit a dental professional because they just don’t have access,” said Gouws.
He said that 400 locations have been visited by the Bophelong unit and 35 000 pupils have benefited from their services.
“A thousand pairs of spectacles have been dispensed to children with eyesight problems free of charge.”
The clinics encompass a dental booth, equipped with all the necessary material to screen, polish, extract and do fillings on teeth; a primary health care consultation room to carry out general health check-ups, nutritional assessments, hearing assessments, gross and fine motor assessments, as well as immunisations; and a visual care booth to assess eyesight, provide the necessary treatment and spectacles where necessary.
Muhammad Khalid Sayed, the chief of staff at the Department of Public Enterprises, said that the department was focused on servicing smaller communities.
“Very often as government we tend to think of big municipalities, but one thing that Minister Lynne Brown over the years emphasised through her political career, is that we need to services communities on the ground,” Sayed said, speaking on behalf of Brown.
“We need to look outside the cities, outside of the big metros. Yes, the metros are important in terms of government and economy but the so-called rural areas are also important.”
- African News Agency (ANA)