In previous blog posts we have shared with you updates on the Community Team’s work providing Youth Friendly Services and reducing malaria cases in the local community. Another really important part of the work of the Community Team is ensuring that children in the local communities are vaccinated against preventable disease. 

According to the Ugandan Ministry of Health, in the South West of Uganda where Bwindi Community Hospital is based, only 66% of children aged 12-23 months old were fully vaccinated in the year 2022. 

The community team at Bwindi Community Hospital are working hard to ensure that all children within the hospital catchment area are vaccinated. This is not always easy! Bwindi Community Hospital is set within a beautiful, but remote and very hilly area. Some of the villages and smaller settlements within its catchment area are impossible to reach by car or motorbike. They can only be accessed by foot, up steep hills on narrow muddy footpaths, or on no obvious path at all! A regular morning sight at the hospital is of motivated members of the Community Team setting off on foot or by motorbike, boxes of vaccines slung over their backs, on their way to deliver vaccines to the children living in the hills around the hospital.

By engaging with community members, through health education talks aiming at disease prevention, raising awareness about vaccinations, actively following up children who do not attend for vaccination and ensuring that there is a reliable supply of vaccines taken direct to communities, the Community Team made sure an impressive 97% of children were fully vaccinated in 2024. 

This a great achievement and a testimony to the strategies that the Community Team employ to ensure they are delivering effective and quality care to the local community. Well done Community Team!

REACH Bwindi is committed to continue to support the programmes of the Community Team at Bwindi Community Hospital. If you would like to help us support the Community Team, please take a look at our Seven Ways to Support Us, or why not become ‘twinned’ with a village! Click here to find out more about our Twinning Project.