Much needed health services are being brought closer to the farming and peri-urban areas of the Western Cape, through a multi-million rand mobile clinic launched by the University of the Western Cape (UWC).
The University’s Faculty of Community and Health Sciences says the state-of-the-art mobile clinic will at the same time offer its students the opportunity to receive training in a community setting.
Funded by the Higher Education Department, the project is one of many outreach programmes, run from the university.
A fully-fledged clinic on wheels with the ability to reach far flung areas and communities, which struggle to access health services.
The unit boasts three consultation rooms, where a range of various services, screenings and procedures can be performed and provided.
Khanyiso Marasi is from UWC Community Health Services Faculty.
“We focus on pap smears, HIV, Aids, and TB testing. We also do glucose testing, cholesterol testing. So, we use our nursing students in the faculty to actually do these services to the community being supervised by the professional nurses and their lecturers and supervisors.”
The clinic will travel to different locations across the province.
It’s already completed outreaches in areas such as Mitchells Plain and Genadendal.
UWC Rector and Vice Chancellor, Prof Tyrone Pretorius, says this is another one of their projects in serving particularly marginalised communities.
“The idea is that instead of sending single disciplines into the community, we want to send multi-professional teams, so we will have our lawyers providing legal advise to the community, we will have our dentists providing dental care, with very sophisticated technologies and then now we have for nursing, physio, occupational therapy and so the idea is to have a multi-disciplinary team.”
Provincial Health Minister Dr Nomafrench Mbombo says extending health services to remote areas is crucial for service delivery and access to health services in the province.
“Health is everybody’s business whilst you might have clinics and mobile clinics here and there but you will find out that here and there it’s not everyday available so it is exciting that UWC which also has been doing community outreach for example in the Theewaterskloof Municipality in the areas of Genadendal and I hear now because of this bus they will be able to extend it to areas like Klipheuwel I think tomorrow.”
The outreach calender is planned in conjuction with the various communities.
