MedShare supports the medical needs of the people of rural Zimbabwe

Through our wonderful partner, Friends of Chidamoyo, MedShare will continue to support Chidamoyo Hospital, which operates a 100-bed hospital with 18 outreach clinics in northwest Zimbabwe

Chidamoyo Hospital serves 70,000+ in-patient and clinic patients every year — among the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. It also provides immunizations, anti-retroviral treatments, labor and delivery services, labs, medications, and more.

Remarkably, the hospital has transformed countless lives on a budget of just $120,000 a year. MedShare is proud to have been able to work with Friends of Chidamoyo to donate thousands of dollars of medical supplies and equipment to help the hospital stretch its limited budget and extend its services throughout the region:

• Through its 18 outreach clinics, half a million infants and children vaccinated against preventable diseases since the hospital’s inception in 1981
• 1,500 newborns safely delivered each year
• 90% reduction in HIV transmission in utero and 90% reduction in the AIDS rate at the hospital
• Nurturing holistic care, including vaccines for newborns and family planning for mothers, at the newly constructed Kathy McCarty Memorial Neo-Natal Building
• Thousands of patients receiving life-saving anti-retroviral medications
• 3,500 girls graduated high school through our educational scholarships

Chidamoyo also provides holistic pre-natal and neo-natal care to both mothers and babies through its 95-bed New Waiting Mother’s Shelter and the newly constructed Kathy McCarty Memorial Neo-Natal building. Through these dedicated facilities, Chidamoyo is able to deliver this specialized care as well as educational and family planning services. Remarkably, in addition to delivering approximately 1,500 babies a year, Chidamoyo has essentially eliminated in utero transmission of HIV from mother to child.

Honoring the memory and legacy of a remarkable individual

For over 40 years, Kathy McCarty served as the heart and soul of Chidamoyo Hospital in rural Zimbabwe. Through her visionary leadership and tireless dedication, Chidamoyo transformed hundreds of thousands of lives by delivering quality healthcare to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. (Friends, colleagues remember Kathy McCarty, heart of African mission hospital – The Press Democrat)

A Lifetime of Devoted Service

From the Santa Rosa Press Democrat

Legions of McCarty fans and followers not only admired her — they worked for her, too. For four decades, McCarty pitched friends and strangers to support Chidamoyo Hospital with both funds and their time and expertise. A seemingly never-ending lineup of Sonoma County residents answered McCarty’s call and signed up to serve the people who live in one of the poorest nations on Earth.

The story goes that McCarty’s mother pushed her off to a volunteer stint in Zimbabwe just after she had graduated from Santa Rosa High. McCarty worked as a secretary at the hospital but decided she wanted to do more. She returned to Sonoma County, went to Santa Rosa Junior College and studied nursing. That was where she would make the biggest impact.

She returned to Zimbabwe in 1981 after the war for independence. She lived there the rest of her life.

The nation has been ravaged by the AIDS epidemic, by tuberculosis, and an ever-faltering economy. The transition from the nation’s currency to the dollar in 2009 marked a point in Chidamoyo’s history when the majority of patients bartered for treatment, trading chickens, goats and peanuts for medical care.

Electricity can be spotty and diesel is extraordinarily expensive. Backup blood supplies in the hospital are rare.

“Blood is not readily available,” Palleschi said. It kept him up at night during work stints there in which his days were filled with surgeries.

“It’s pitch black, nurses are doing their rounds with flashlights,” he said. “I live in a bit of a panic. What if my patients bleed in the middle of the night?”

Palleschi recalled one operation during which he asked for a pair of Metzenbaum scissors — a delicate tool with extended shanks for surgery.

“They gave me something you could prune roses with,” he said.

Still, advocates say the care is top notch and that Zimbabweans travel hours, days even, to get access to care there. McCarty has been lauded for her early and aggressive steps to educate villagers about AIDS and how to prevent it. She developed a successful prenatal care program and was behind a shelter for expectant mothers that included medications that help prevent the spread of infection to newborns.

McCarty developed an immunization program in the early 1980s and in 1991, she launched a home-based care for people living with HIV — a first in her district, according to the Zimbabwe Standard.

And she did it in a medical environment unheard of in the U.S.

In a video created by the New York Times in 2010, hospital staff and volunteers can be seen shoveling peanuts used as payment, sorting medication bottles to reuse cotton balls and setting aside instruction papers to use as toilet paper. They sterilized surgical gloves for reuse and boiled hospital gowns in cauldrons over an open fire.

And McCarty was the heart of the operation. Both nurse and administrator, she was a volunteer cheerleader, successful fundraiser and effective PR maven.

In her off hours, she kept a blog to keep supporters up to date on hospital doings, but also to gin up more support.

So big was her presence, backers worry that her loss will be more than personal, that it will affect the hospital’s viability.

“What I worry about is the next generation,” Patty LeDonne said. “Will there be people in the next generation who will care about this? This is a very significant hospital in Zimbabwe.”