Over the past week, Direct Relief has delivered 416 shipments of requested medical aid to 38 U.S. states and territories and 15 countries worldwide. The shipments contained 4.3 million defined daily doses of medication.
This week, medications and supplies shipped included rare disease management medications, surgical supplies, diabetes management medications, personal protective equipment, and more.
Medications and supplies to treat conditions that put mothers and babies most at risk in the weeks before or after labour and delivery arrived at a critical hospital in Bangladesh this week.
Hope Foundation Hospital for Women and Children of Bangladesh received 20 Perinatal Health Kits from Direct Relief. The kits contain medications and supplies to treat conditions that can occur with life-threatening impacts on women and newborns, including preeclampsia/eclampsia, prevention of premature birth, infection, and respiratory distress. The kits contain enough medications and supplies to treat 1,000 cases of each indication.
Hope Hospital, which provides critical patient care, including labour and delivery services, to the surrounding community as well as women needing care from the nearby Rohingya refugee settlement in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
The hospital is one of five pilot sites for the Perinatal Health Kits, which were designed in collaboration with and endorsed by the International Confederation of Midwives. The kits have also been sent to health providers in Somaliland, Uganda, and Malawi, with an additional shipment in process to Tanzania.
Based on provider feedback, Direct Relief will continue refining the kits and the items included.
The Perinatal Health Kits complement Direct Relief’s Midwife Kit, which was also developed with and endorsed by ICM. The Midwife Kits contain medical essentials needed for safe births and have been deployed to 35 countries to support health providers.
In rural Liberia where power isn’t a given and hospital staff have had to treat patients by the light of only a cell phone during an outage, the lights are now on.
The FJ Grante Hospital, located in Greenville, Liberia, is now online with electrification and lighting, allowing the facility to harness the power of the sun and be energy resilient. The facility, which provides emergency surgeries and treatment to the southeast region of the country, depended on diesel generators formerly to power lights and equipment. The area lacks an electrical grid, and the cost and availability of diesel limit power access, with life-impacting consequences.
The solar installation at the hospital is part of the larger Africa Infrastructure Relief and Support, or AIRS, project — a Society of Critical Care Medicine Collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Global Alliance of Perioperative Professionals and the Institute of Global Perioperative Care.
Through AIRS, Direct Relief is funding reliable power and medical oxygen projects in Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and Liberia, with a $5.5 million grant. A solar installation and battery backup at the hospital are creating resilient power for medical operations there, and a medical oxygen plant at the site is expected to come online shortly.
