Medical Initiative

The Mercy Center Healthcare Clinic was started with generous support from the Newman’s Own Foundation. Since then, we provide aid as we can to help the clinic. The basic goals and services are:

Combat Disease and Provide Essential Health Services:

• Childhood Immunizations: The clinic has administered over 10,000 vaccinations; 15,000 new patients have been treated since August 2006 and several thousand have been cared for on return visits.  Critical immunizations against polio, diphtheria, pertussis, whooping cough, and other childhood diseases are administered on a regular basis. Basic family medical checkups are provided on a regular basis now in Lare.
• Maternity Care:  Women receive basic maternity check-ups.  There is a need to expand to a 2-bed maternity unit.  80% of women still give birth at home; many of these women would prefer to go to an upgraded maternity center.
• Mobile Health Clinic: The staff in Lare has developed a plan to use the ambulance for outreach clinics in the surrounding neighborhoods.  Patients who cannot walk to the clinic will now receive care closer to their homes. The clinic offers laboratory and pharmacy services as well as medical care. Its ambulance transports patients with serious health problems to Nakuru or Nairobi and serves as a mobile clinic for the broader community.
• HIV AIDs: The clinic is in need of conducting HIV Aids testing, services, education and awareness as well as a host of other needs in order to expand and modernize its outreach to meet the growing needs of the population in 2015.

Expanding Services: Dental Care

Dental care is inextricably linked to personal hygiene, overall health and clean water for drinking and cooking. Although the fluoride levels in Lare are relatively low and within the standard set by the United Nations, other diseases have emerged in the community that need to be addressed through basic dental care.

Rural Kenya still lacks the infrastructure, services, and available resources to provide sufficient dental care and dental disease prevention education. In rural areas, access to dental care is mostly limited to emergency care only. Additional treatment is unavailable, unsafe or unreliable or much too expensive. In order to educate the population and combat new emerging diseases, the Mercy Center seeks to expand dental services in 2015 to provide cleanings, x-rays and basic dental care and education. Oral problems related to growing HIV AIDs cases has caused widespread fungal infections such as those caused by candida and necrotizing gingivitis. The Mercy medical clinic needs to address these and other growing and related diseases emerging in rural Kenya.

Local and International Partnerships

• Crosslink International (Falls Church, VA): A shipping container with essential medical supplies was delivered in 2009.
• Little Sisters of St. Francis and Nyumbani Village (Kenya): Staff members are helping us run the clinic with volunteers and to develop plans for an HIV treatment and counseling center.
• The German dental organization, Arzt-und Zahnarzthilfe Kenya e.V. periodically visits the clinic through a partnership with St. Anthony's Health Center in Nakuru.
• St. Anthony’s Health Center provided a dental chair, generator and table to the Mercy clinic.

Click here to join the Dental Care effort.