Connect with us

General News

Kenya: Ambulance Service for Poor Helps Residents of Nairobi’s Largest Slum

Published

4 years ago

on

[ad_1]

Nairobi — A community health service in Africa’s largest urban slum is helping poor people get affordable emergency services during the COVID pandemic.

The Kibera community emergency response team in Nairobi is offering a $1 monthly fee for access to emergency services, including an ambulance.

Poor people – like those living in Nairobi’s Kibera slum – find it difficult to access emergency health care.

Even where public services such as clinics and hospitals are provided within slums, the high cost effectively bars most Kibera residents from calling an ambulance.

It’s a challenge Moses Omondi — who was born and brought up in Kibera slum — has undertaken.

He formed a community emergency response team that provides services to slum residents for a fee of $1 a month, including ambulance transport to the hospitals.

“If you have an ambulance, you can easily access a hospital because no hospital should deny you services when you have been taken there by an ambulance, Moses Omondi said. “It means it’s an emergency case that needs emergency attention.”

Annet Okumu is one of about 300 subscribers to the ambulance service. She said she received potentially lifesaving care inside an ambulance after an accident last year.

“The condition I was in wasn’t that good,” Okumu said. “I was really having a very bad headache, I was bleeding. So maybe I could have overbled if I couldn’t have gotten the first aid service.”