Our Work
Community Outreach
Traditional Birth Attendants
As part of our rollout of Labor & Delivery and Reproductive & Child Health services, in 2015, we conducted a very focused program of community outreach. Targeting “gatekeepers” to healthcare, our community outreach team spent 10 days in the field, reaching out to local dispensaries and Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) in 28 communities throughout the Karatu and Ngorongoro districts.
The goal of this program is to inform local healthcare providers about the new maternal health services available at FAME Medical and to provide information on complications of pregnancy for which care should be sought at a health center. Over the course of the outreach, our team has met personally with 111 active TBAs, as well as healthcare workers at 26 area dispensaries. We’ve also hosted 89 TBAs at the FAME campus to participate in an informative session & receive a tour of our facilities.
Neurology
In 2020, 435 patients were seen during our bi-annual neurology clinic. Long-time volunteer, Dr. Michael Rubenstein helped spearhead this program in 2013 and has since been the connection for our collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Residency Program, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Dr. Michael travels to FAME with UPenn Neurology residents, bringing expertise in adult and pediatric neurology, movement disorders, and epileptology.
People with neurological conditions represent a very underserved population in Tanzania. Thus, we have patients coming from as far away as Dar es Salaam and Tanga for consults. In addition to clinic drop-in days, the neurology team, along with FAME community outreach staff, conducts a drop-in and follow-up clinic at previously identified low-resource dispensaries located in some of the most remote parts of the district.
In 2022,
547 patients seen by the Neurology Clinic
2,449 people screened for Rheumatic Heart Disease
112 Women screened for cervical cancer
FAME originally began as a mobile medical clinic, serving remote populations out of the back of a pickup truck. FAME’s mobile clinic provided medical care to remote communities for a decade. Numerous factors contributed to FAME’s decision to stop mobile clinic outreach: In 2012, FAME opened its inpatient ward with two operating rooms. In late 2014, FAME launched labor & delivery and prenatal services. We made the strategic decision to direct our focus to treating patients who arrive at the FAME campus, while using outreach to focus on specialty services & treatment that would otherwise be entirely unavailable.
