FIRST FIVE HOSPITALS RECEIVE CRITICAL SUPPLIES
Lilongwe, Malawi … They rolled in rapidly as though they were fire trucks on the way to a forest fire. Their objective was vitally important to literally millions of people. They were the first of 28 district hospitals that would come to Action for Progress (AfP) sites to pick up critically needed hand sanitizer for their staff and patients.
Despite a critical fuel shortage which has been sidelining vehicles nationwide, they come out of importance and need. Hospitals struggle to handle the overwhelming patient load, and the partnership between government and AfP is extremely beneficial to keeping hospitals furnished with an ample quantity of needed supplies. For both AfP and the Malawi government, trying to cope with a current population of 20,303,660 (September 27, 2022) is an escalating challenge. To supply even a portion of these needs, the Malawi Project in the U.S. needs an ever-increasing donor network to take advantage of a constantly increasing opportunity to serve. A recent Memorandum of Understanding between AfP and the Ministry of Health has helped cement the relationship between both groups and raised the importance of AfP to the health care community.
Even before the shipments of hand sanitizer arrived at the sprawling AfP warehouse west of the city, AfP officials had already held meetings with the Ministry of Health and determined how many boxes of sanitizer should go to each of twenty-eight District Hospitals in the nation. It was decided these facilities needed to be assisted first and Tier One and Tier Three facilities should come later. (Malawi’s healthcare system is divided into three parts. Tier One is the highest and consists of major hospitals in the nation. There are five of them, and they are in major population centers. District Hospitals are Tier Two, and there is a district hospital in each of the twenty-eight districts of Malawi. Tier Three includes the multiple rural hospitals that are spaced to fulfill a Ministry of Health objective to have medical care within reach of all Malawians.)
On this day, the trucks that rushed to reach AfP despite the fuel shortage were from hospitals in Malawi’s Central Region. Shortly AfP will deliver hand sanitizer to drop points in both Blantyre and Mzuzu. Hospitals in those two regions will go to those points to pick up the hand sanitizer. Jim Messenger and Dan Brewer, from the Malawi Project, can be seen assisting in the loading of the trucks that came from the hospitals.
