Donate to PATH : Rehydration corners
Caring for Kenya’s children
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Alfred Ochola is on a mission to protect young lives from diarrheal disease
Editor’s note: Hope Randall is a program assistant at PATH. She traveled to Kenya in September 2009 to learn more about how PATH is helping the country address diarrheal disease.
“You see these children, behind you. No one invited the children to this meeting—but they are my agenda.”
—Alfred Ochola, primary health care coordinator for PATH in Kenya, speaking at a community meeting in Western Province, Kenya
Alfred Ochola is the primary health care coordinator for PATH’s Enhanced Diarrheal Disease Control Initiative, which focuses on bringing new tools for preventing and treating severe diarrhea to poor countries. In September, I spent four days shadowing him in Kenya’s Western Province.
Alfred told me that we will never meet the international goal of reducing child mortality unless we control diarrhea. After witnessing his compassion for the children who benefit from his work, I can think of no better authority on the matter than this health professional, who is quick to uphold the dignity of those little lives.
He fervently believes that oral rehydration therapy corners—dedicated areas in health clinics that offer children immediate, lifesaving treatment for diarrheal disease—are necessary to reduce the impact of diarrheal disease. He has made reestablishing these rehydration corners a personal mission.
Dangerous dehydration
In the children’s ward of a clinic in Bungoma District, a rural, dusty region, I watched Alfred gently examine a tiny child, severely dehydrated from a recent bout of diarrhea. The more severe the dehydration, the longer it takes to treat. Rehydration corners save lives because children are able to be treated quickly, without waiting for hours to receive medical attention.
In the corners, outfitted with chairs and a water container, parents can sit with their ill children and help them drink oral rehydration solution (ORS)—a simple mixture of water, sugar, and salt—to regain vital fluids. The corners have slowly disappeared from Kenya’s clinics, though, and PATH is working to bring them back. This clinic in Bungoma District reestablished its rehydration corner just a few months ago.
Five-day hospital stay
Alfred told me that if the sick child had received ORS maybe four or five hours earlier, he could have been treated as an outpatient. Yet as things stand, this child (who, as one of the lucky ones, was regaining strength) will be in the hospital for approximately five days, stretching already scant hospital resources.
Alfred explained to me, “A hospital must help, but it must also sustain itself. The child’s mother is also not producing a living for five days. She is spending all day at the hospital doing nothing at home. There are a lot of direct and indirect costs.”
The toll of untreated disease
The burden of these costs is palpable to all involved, including to the health care workers. In this particular ward, one nurse manages 33 children and sees about ten cases of diarrhea per day—representing roughly a third of the space in the ward. When a rehydration corner takes root here, the number of children admitted into the ward due to dehydration could easily drop to as few as two cases per day. It will revolutionize the way health care workers approach the treatment of diarrhea.
In the few short months since he started at PATH, Alfred has trained more than 200 community health care workers in new and improved protocols for administering ORS and zinc, another powerful treatment tool for diarrhea. At least 60 of these workers were so eager to learn about these low-cost, proven methods of treatment that they took the initiative to organize themselves and ask Alfred to teach them.
Compassion and action
At the time of my visit, Alfred had already revitalized seven rehydration corners. Donations to PATH to reinstitute the corners across Western Province will fund a simple set of supplies: comfortable benches, plastic containers for water, a clock, and hot plates to boil water and cook porridge. Alfred is also building relationships with Kenya’s Ministry of Health to ensure a constant supply of zinc tablets and ORS for clinics. And the results are already outstanding: as the number of children treated as outpatients in rehydration corners increases, the number of children who are admitted into hospital wards plummets.
Alfred says the challenge of meeting Kenya’s need for diarrhea treatment is a challenge he shares with PATH. That means it’s our challenge, too—we also have a role to play. Alfred’s compassion translates to dedication, hard work, and results. But he cannot do it on his own.
