Clinic Program Update

As part of our clinic program, Mano a Mano Bolivia keeps extremely detailed statistics for everything they do, from number of patient visits to vaccinations to outcomes in each of our 120 clinics in operation. To give you an idea of what our clinics do, here are some of the numbers for the first 3 months of 2011 (119 clinics reporting):

• 179,342 patient visits overall. The focus of our clinics is primary care, and particularly maternal & child health, and that is reflected in our visits.
• 49,051 general medicine visits, including 24,504 exams for children under 5

Child and mother waiting to be seen in the La Joya clinic in the department of Chuquisaca

• 36,430 dental visits, including 2,124 extractions and 8,186 fluoride applications. Dental work is in high demand, and we have dentists in 48 of our clinics.

• 21,515 OB/Gyn exams
• 9,164 prenatal exams and consults

• 9,585 vaccinations. This includes vaccinations for yellow fever, tetanus, and a series for children under the age of one.
• 392 deliveries, with 384 live births. Providing trained personnel to assist during deliveries is one of our primary services; having access to trained assistance significantly improves mortality rates, but is particularly lacking in rural areas. In rural Bolivia, only half of all deliveries are assisted by trained personnel, in contrast to 88% of births in urban Bolivia (Caruso, Stephenson & Leon, 2010; World Health Organization, 2009). Due to this gap in services and extreme poverty, in rural Bolivia up to 8% of infants die within a month of birth, and the maternal mortality rate is 524 per 100,000. In our clinics, we have attended 14,065 deliveries since 1999, with 13,984 live births; the infant mortality rate in our clinics is 0.58%, and no mothers have died during childbirth. This is a huge reduction; statistically one could expect 1,125 babies and 74 mothers to die.

• 1 new clinic built in Aramisi, Bolivia. The first quarter of the year is the rainy season in Bolivia, so most of our construction is done later. We are on track to build 8-12 clinics in 2011.
• 28,141 education hours for Mano a Mano staff and communities. Health education is a huge component of our clinic model; we train on average 10 health promoters in each community, and our medical staff attend at least one continuing education conference every two years. Mano a Mano Bolivia schedules ten continuing education conferences each year, including an annual collaboration with Regions Hospital.

Community Health Promoters Learning CPR

These are just a few of the many facets of our clinic program. We are proud of the results, and are very grateful to our staff and volunteers at Mano a Mano Bolivia, and the local communities and municipal governments who all work extremely hard to make these projects successful.