Partnership expected to rehabilitate region's treatment facilities
Kukuku Clinic, an isolated Seventh-day Adventist healthcare center in the Solomon Islands, is the poster child for a new initiative by the Health Ministries department in the Adventist Church’s South Pacific region. Five years ago, the then meagerly staffed and supplied clinic first received funding from church members at the Hillview Adventist Church in Morisset, New South Wales, Australia.
Today, the clinic is clean, efficient and fully contributes to the church’s medical outreach work in the region.
But unlike Kukuku Clinic, most of the 54 health clinics operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the South Pacific are reportedly in need of more emergency care than the patients they serve. Some 70 percent don’t have medical equipment to check blood pressure, local church health officials discovered during a three-month evaluation earlier this year.
To revive the ailing healthcare centers, Adventist health officials in the region are launching Adopt a Clinic, a program to team each Adventist church in Australia and New Zealand with one of the region’s clinics, which range from bush huts to modern-style buildings.
“What amazed me most was the steadfast commitment shown by the staff in these dilapidated clinics without so much as a stethoscope,” says Dr. Peter Landless, an associate Health Ministries director for the Adventist world church who visited the South Pacific region recently. “Many in similar situations might have said, ‘You know, we’ve had enough, let’s pack our things.’ But they stayed on, and this program gives them hope.”
The 80 to 90 percent of the South Pacific’s population that lives in remote areas of the region depends on small local clinics for healthcare, immunizations and emergency treatment. But often staff at the nearest clinic don’t have so much as running water or electricity, let alone the more advanced medical supplies needed to prevent and treat malaria and waterborne diseases that otherwise spread unbridled in the region.
Villages without a clinic face an additional challenge—the cost of traveling to a clinic via inter-island canoe often far exceeds a family’s annual income, says Trevor Oliver, a member of the Hillview Adventist Church. Oliver says most of the islands are too small to support airstrips, making travel by makeshift watercraft the only way to get even rudimentary medical treatment.
“As a church, we’ve long been proud of our health work, but we haven’t always been able to keep up with the growth of the church when it comes to maintaining our health facilities,” Landless says.
Most of the clinics receive basic drug supplies and staff wages from the government, says Jonathan Duffy, director of Health Ministries for the church’s South Pacific region. But the support does not extend to building maintenance or adequate equipment—staff battle termites and rust and often live in houses more “appalling” than the clinics where they work, Duffy has observed.
Some say repair and maintenance of local clinics lies with the villagers they serve, but most of the indigenous people are subsistence workers who do what they can, but are not able to support the clinics, Landless says. Given the region’s rampant poverty and unemployment, he says self-sufficiency for the clinics is not feasible and that Adopt a Clinic will likely be “a long term relationship.”
In Tumbolbil, situated in the New Guinean highlands, one clinic, built by villagers equipped only with axes, awaits funds for furnishing and medical supplies.
Each church will provide US$1,000 to $40,000 over time to fully refurbish one clinic, Duffy estimates. “That doesn’t mean that a church will have to be very rich, but that they have a mission focus,” Landless says. “Whenever a church stops focusing purely on itself, its mission flourishes.”
Duffy, too, expects the benefits of Adopt a Clinic will boomerang. “It’s easy for our churches to become more congregational and focused on just what happens within their church and the Adopt a Clinic program would give them a broader mission focus.”
So far, congregational response to the program is “overwhelming,” Duffy says. He expects the moral support resulting from the clinic-church partnerships will prove as valuable as the money. Villagers on remote islands often feel isolated from the world church, he says, and Adopt a Clinic will let them know that “they are not forgotten, but [are] a part of a big church family.”
At Hillview, members hope a 50-foot catamaran they’re turning into a mobile clinic will boost that sense of connectedness. By December, the boat will provide medical care to the islands in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands—just east of New Guinea and northeast of Australia—where few clinics exist. Oliver expects similar mobile clinics will follow.
Duffy says the church’s South Pacific region headquarters is distributing DVDs about the Adopt a Clinic program to each church in the area.
