In October 2019, I travelled to Cape Town South Africa with a group of final year nursing students to work with SHAWCO. SHAWCO is a student run non-profit organisation that provides mobile, primary health clinics to rural communities in South Africa.
We joined with a team of medical students from the University of Cape Town as well as a local physician and each day, we travelled to a different township to run the mobile health clinics.
The clinics were run in the evenings in order to accommodate the majority of people. Our role was to admit and assess each patient, provide screening tests and work with the doctor to diagnose and administer treatments. We treated between 20 – 40 people per evening and the clinics would run from 6pm, until everyone had been seen which usually took between 4-5 hours.
These clinics are so important as it gives the local communities access to primary healthcare services like preventative screenings for hypertension, HIV and diabetes. The mobile clinics also enables people to be treated for minor illnesses and injuries and acquire free medications that they would otherwise have to travel great distances for.
SHAWCO operates 200 of these mobile health clinics per year and like many organisations, they rely on the generosity of donors to continue operating. We were able to raise a total of $3,370AUD which will cover the operating costs for 11 of these essential clinics. We would like to thank the Rotary Club of Perth for their generous support of our endeavours. This trip provided me with an amazing first-hand experience in delivering healthcare in a developing country. All of the students who attended will be able to carry these invaluable skills into their future careers in nursing.
Savannah Inouye