Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI)

Programs

Mobile Pharmacy in Northern Uganda Project (MPNUP)

last updated Feb 24, 2012

Overview

Implementing organization: 
International Pharmaceutical Students’ Federation (IPSF)
Legal Status: 
Private (not-for-profit)
Year Launched: 
2010
Stage: 
Existing/expansion stage
Income Level of Target Population: 
Bottom 20%

Scale

Number of Clients Served: 
Approximately 100 people out of the 2,500 per camp
Summary: 

MPNUP aims at increasing accessibility, quality and effectiveness of health services in northern Uganda by improving and supporting public health, medical care and home-based services, and increase awareness on hygiene and infectious diseases. It also advocates for the healthcare of vulnerable individuals such as orphans, mothers and the disabled.

Key program components: 

In the Mobile Pharmacy in Northern Uganda Project, pharmacy students from the International Pharmaceutical Student's Federation organize the dispensary, help to organize stock and ensure that all medicines are up to date. Village health team leaders are trained and also public health campaigns carried out addressing topics like hygiene and sanitation which are crucial to improving the inhabitants environment and preventing potentially fatal diseases.

The MPNUP team visits camps around Gulu providing people with basic medical care and medicines three times a week, using a mobile clinic which is usually set up under a tree or in an abandoned hut. Volunteers work with a physician and translator to provide healthcare following an assessment of the villagers requiring healthcare by a physician and a field operations manager.

The MPNUP coordinator records the patient specific information while the pharmacy students in the clinics check the medicines prescribed by the doctor, then together with the translator, explain the dosage and administration instructions to patients as well as answer any questions that they may have.

Program history: 

The lives of nearly two million Ugandan citizens have been devastated by a 23-year long civil war between the Ugandan government and the Lords Resistance Army, with approximately 25,000 children forcefully recruited making them become children of war and thousands of people injured and/ or killed. In 1996, the government made a decision to move 1.8 million citizens out of Pader district into IDP camps which lacked adequate and appropriate infrastructure, education systems and healthcare yet they were over crowded and poverty and disease were widely spread.

Following the success of the Neema Village Concept Project, which was an IPSF humanitarian project held in Tanzania in 1993, sufficient work and research into the field yielded a need for provision of basic healthcare in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in northern Uganda, thus leading to the development of the Mobile Pharmacy in Northern Uganda Project (MPNUP), another humanitarian project.

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