What each camp provides
- A qualified doctor and a dispenser on site from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm
- Free consultation, with no registration fee and no charge of any kind
- Medicines dispensed on the spot from stock brought with the team
- Health and hygiene awareness, delivered in Sindhi so that everyone present understands it
- Referral to a hospital in town for any condition that cannot be treated safely in the field
Who attends
Predominantly women, children and elderly people — precisely those least able to travel to a clinic in town. The complaints we see most frequently are waterborne stomach illness, skin infections, anaemia, untreated fever, and the long-standing joint and back pain that follows years of heavy manual labour.
Because the camp is held in the settlement itself, women who could never have made the journey to town are examined by a doctor, in many cases for the first time in years.
Why we hold camps in the village
Distance is not the only barrier. A trip to a town clinic costs the fare in both directions, a day of lost wages, and frequently a male relative’s time as well. For a household living close to the edge, that is enough to make people wait and hope the illness passes. It often does not.
Bringing the doctor to the settlement removes every one of those costs. Patients attend who would otherwise have stayed at home, and conditions are identified early enough to be treated cheaply.
The impact
At a recent camp the doctor worked from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon without a genuine break. The queue was mostly women and children, and by the middle of the day the pattern was clear: stomach complaints, skin infections, and children whose exhaustion had more to do with what they were drinking than with what they were eating.
Every patient was seen free of charge and given the medicine they required. The doctor’s own conclusion at the end of the day was that half of what he had treated would return within the month unless the settlement obtained a clean water source. That is why our water and health teams now plan their schedules together.