Dr. Olive Kobusingye wants health workers protected
“I just posted that our health workers were going to need help, and I told people what kind of help I thought they would need,”
The Daily monitor, one of the local dailies in Uganda, describes her as a change agent. Verbatim: Dr. Olive Kobusingye is a consultant trauma surgeon, emergency surgeon, accident injury epidemiologist, academic and author. Her desire is to see change in Uganda’s health sector and she authored books to this effect. She currently serves as a senior research fellow at Makerere University School of Public Health.
And that was the description that would lead CivSource to dig into what she might be up to as the country tries to cope with coronavirus. “Well,” she starts. “It is all there on my Facebook page.” True, the doctor had made it a point that the world doesn’t forget the Ugandan health workers. Her Facebook page is awash with advocacy for the health workers to be protected and provided for during these times.
“I just posted that our health workers were going to need help, and I told people what kind of help I thought they would need,” she explains. “For a couple of days it just sat there, nobody did anything.” But something changed and she started to see results. “Then a friend gave me 50k,” she narrates. “Another gave me 100k.”
But she dared not tell them the days spent with no response had demoralized her team. “Now I knew I could not just tell them we had lost steam,” she jokes. “So I began to thank them loudly, and others started to give.” The least amount she has received is Shs10.000. “The most if from a Ugandan doctor in Australia, he sent me Aus$1000,” she recalls.
So she got to work, but needed a little more help getting the job done. “I called a couple of colleagues, told them I needed their help,” she narrates. “So we have been buying masks, gowns, foodstuffs and delivering them to Mulago A&E. That is the story!”
By CivSource Team