KENYA PROJECT GROUP

Kenya, East Africa, was the site of our first project. Up to fifty (50) hospitals are operated by church organizations in rural Kenya as charitable institutions. Approximately thirty are operated by the Catholic missionaries under the Kenya Catholic Secretariat (KCS). Another sixteen are operated by various Protestant denominations and affiliated with the Christian Health Association of Kenya (CHAK). Together, these hospitals provide forty percent (40%) of the primary health care needs of Kenya. These hospitals are located in rural areas of Kenya and the patients they serve generally have little or no access to the government or private healthcare system due to financial and/or geographic limitations. The size and location of these facilities are such that establishing their own histopathology services on-site is not practical for them. Our initial goal was to centralize the histopathology service by establishing a histopathology laboratory in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. This proved to be an efficient way to provide histopathology service to these rural hospitals. A second goal was to upgrade the clinical laboratory facilities of these hospitals through educational forums for the technologists and on-site consultations by experienced pathologists and technologists.