Kenya Inhaler Project 2024/5
Background to our Kenyan partner
The Dreamland Hospital, a UK registered charity, number 1107038, has been providing quality healthcare to the rural community in the Mount Elgon and Bungoma county of Western Kenya since 1999. The Dreamland Hospital is a charity and does not look to make a profit.
It is administered both from Kenya and from the UK by our partner Dr Rebecca Nightingale, who works as a clinical academic at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Dr Nightingale lived in Western Kenya for many years while working with a community to develop a small health centre into a hospital. In those early days, a nine-year-old boy was brought to the health centre with acute asthma. At that time the health centre lacked the emergency medicines to treat him, and the boy died. This triggered a chain reaction, and the hospital was slowly developed into a 90-bed hospital, with dedicated acute respiratory equipment and medication.
Asthma International's role
However, the hospital does not currently have anything other than emergency facilities for treating asthmatic patients, which is why Asthma International is partnering with it to create a fully-funded asthma management programme for hundreds of children and adults.
This will take the form of:
- Purchase and shipping of medicines from Nairobi
- Introductory consultation and spirometric testing to confirm the severity of asthma
- Dispensing of medicines
- Follow-up appointments and dispensing
- Travel bursaries for children and adults in remote districts
The Kenya Inhaler project builds on Asthma International's achievements in Vietnam. With this new project it aims to:
- decrease the project delivery cost (i.e. diagnosis, medications, check-ups and training) from £117 per patient per year (Vietnam) to £78 (Kenya);
- work with poorer and more disadvantaged communities than those in Vietnam, with no access to health insurance and thus completely uncontrolled asthma;
- scale the programme up from a pilot two-year programme to a larger and more ambitious rolling operation;
- ensure that data is available in real time to trustees in the UK, helping in project evaluation;
- ‘soft publish’ the project as a Quality Improvement project or audit. Later there could be a publication in an academic journal;
- achieve match-funding, even if only as a small percentage of the total budget, either from governmental or other non-profit sources.
Budget and timescale
This is a rolling project due to begin in 2024/5. The budget for this programme will require £38,010 per annum. Please see here for more details of how this money is spent.
Asthma International allows donors, simply by ticking a box, to ring-fence their donations, so that 100% is spent on any or all of the following components: Project Delivery, Salaries, Fundraising or Reserves.
Without Asthma International’s work to raise the amounts necessary by appealing to a wide range of prospective donors (governmental schemes, grant-making foundations, text-to-give, legacy funding, private individuals, etc), any inhaler programme at the Dreamland Hospital would struggle to find consistent year-on-year support.
Images left copyright Dreamland Hospital CIO no. 1107038
We need your consent to load the translations
We use a third-party service to translate the website content that may collect data about your activity. Please review the details in the privacy policy and accept the service to view the translations.