Treating with a Mission is an independent association, whose aim is to provide development aid to Kenyan hospitals by shipping medical equipment and conducting workshops for the personnel. Treating with a Mission is a unique project made up of medical, dentistry, midwifery, optometry students and doctors. We’ve started as a student society at the Poznan University of Medical Sciences and thanks to the passionate involvement of its members, it evolved into a sub project of the foundation we’ve been working with at the time and then into an independent association focusing on the improvement of the quality of medical care in the countries of the Global South, as well as training and mobilisation of the medical sciences’ students from all over Poland.

In 2018 throughout the course of three months we’ve sent 61 volunteers, including 18 doctors, a physiotherapist, 2 optometrists, dental hygienist and medical, dentistry and midwifery students. They were working on 13 different, specialized medical projects, which were created on the basis of our experience and medical guidelines so that they cover the most important and real needs of Kenyan patients.

The biggest issue of medical care in Kenya is the lack of qualified personnel and shortage of functioning equipment and drugs. Specialist care is almost non-existent outside country’s capital, Nairobi, and the number of doctor per capita is 11 times smaller compared to Poland. Hospitals which we cooperate with are placed far from big cities and many times are the only places where people living nearby can seek medical help. All of the above are reasons why the help is so crucial for the wellbeing of a substantial number of patients and why we decided to focus our work on them.