Amy Elizabeth Hehre
OVI Children’s Hospital, Kenya
Title: Social interventions for pediatric medicine in vulnerable populations: Reaching the orphaned, abandoned, and destitute children of sub-Saharan Africa
Biography
Biography: Amy Elizabeth Hehre
Abstract
There are 34 million documented orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. Many, without any appropriate representation or resources to access care for their critical medical needs. Even more are the millions of undocumented children who are disabled by extreme poverty, loss and neglect within the communities. In these populations, even a fever that could be easily managed with a simple pain killer can escalate into a debilitating or even deadly febrile seizure. Cerebral palsy and other physical ailments can lead to severe malnutrition, wasting and bed sores in crowded institutions where caregiver to child ratio is alarmingly low. Temporary medical camps and health outreach centers are unequipped to provide advanced services to children with specialized medical needs such as cancer, kidney disease and conditions requiring advanced surgeries which require intensive care unit admission and lengthy follow-up measures. And so often, orphaned newborns are dying and helplessly abandoned because remaining family members are simply unable to nourish the child in the absence of the mother’s breast milk. OVI Children’s Hospital was established in December 2017 to provide representation and free, advanced medical services to this exact population. In their first year of operation, they have successfully used their work and research to stratify the need and means of implementation for enabling the best possible care for the world’s most vulnerable children.