Global Philanthropist Circle Member's AID Village Clinics To Be Featured on CNN

On September 23 and 24 2006, CNN will air a one-hour program on the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa featuring the work of AID Village Clinics, founded and managed by Ann Lurie, a member of the Global Philanthropists Circle. The program highlights AID Village Clinics' innovative health model that uses a central medical facility and health outreach workers on motorcycles to deliver healthcare to a population of 90,000 Kenyans scattered across a large, rural and resource-poor area of South East Kenya. Check local listings for time of the program.

Ann Lurie, a pediatric nurse and philanthropist, implemented a community health model that incorporates a central medical facility, a mobile clinic, and healthcare workers trained to ride motorcycles in the bush. The staff at the central medical facility treats close to 100 patients each weekday. This facility houses exam rooms, an HIV/AIDS voluntary counseling and testing center, labs, a pharmacy, x-ray facility, and a 20 bed in-patient unit for the critically ill. To reach patients at home, some as far as 50 miles away from the central facility, AID Village Clinics created an outreach team of 15 health workers who ride motorcycles and launched a mobile clinic staffed by a physician, nurse, and lab technologist. These mobile health workers leverage the fixed-base infrastructure to treat another 100 patients a day.

The AID Village Clinics initiative covers a community of 90,000 individuals dispersed over a wide area of rural Kenya and provides life-saving anti-retroviral therapy to approximately 1,400 patients with HIV/AIDS. AID Village Clinics implemented its health model with assistance from Riders for Health, a United Kingdom-based charity focused on solving medical transport issues in Africa.

For more information about the Global Philanthropists Circle, please visit our Global Philanthropists Circle page and the GPC Web Parlor.