Improving health infrastructure &
medical services

Health Care

Our medical facility in Nairobi provides holistic primary healthcare both to children and youth under our care as well as to the members of the community.

Our services in SOS Children’s Village Medical Centre in Eldoret include; maternity services, dental care and general outpatient services.

SOS Children's Village Medical Centre in Nairobi's approach and Orphaned and Vulnerable Children (OVC) programming focuses on demonstrating impact, efficiency, sustainability, partnership and human rights as we work to achieve an AIDS free generation. Our core interventions include; prevention for caregivers and OVC, care and treatment, case finding and policy and public health system support. Our program implementation is guided by the PEPFAR technical considerations where interventions are client centered to ensure that we deliver services that respond to the need of the client while controlling the epidemic. The program applies the family-centered approaches to mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS and ensure that children and adolescents remain AIDS free, healthy, safe, stable and schooled.

Target: The program targets the caregivers, children and adolescent girls' girls and boys.

Key inventions include -

A. Care and Treatment: We encourage the caregives to test and we adopt the test and start model through linkages to our medical centres and other care and treatment centres. We also support them through age appropriate discloser of HIV status to their children who have reached 5 years and carry out full discloser for those that are 10 years. Routine HIV/AIDS risk assessment is done for adolescents and re testing done based on risk score. We follow through with Children Living with HIV (CLHIV) to achieve adherence and supression and where eligible support them to complete the TB preventive treatment.

B. Case Finding: We identify children with HIV positve biological parents and link them with testing, care and treatment. We also support them through case management to ensure they have access to food, shelter, education, health, acquisition of legal documents, psychosocial support and legal protection. We leverage on government social protection programs and education subsidies available for the client.

C. Case Management : To ensure self reliance and sustainability, together with the caregiver we develop a case mangement plan for each household to identify resources, priorities, potentials and capacities to enable them address their own challenges. Based on the assessment we offer appropriate support towards self-reliance with a focus on food production, childcare-training skills, economic strengthening.

D. Household Economic Resilience: This involves livelihoods, legal support to secure property, resources and household resource management. The program mobilizes the caregivers into functional Village Savings and Loaning Associations (VSLAs) to enable them to access credit facilities for business in their various groups. Additionally we also focus on empowerment of the youth and young adults through Technical Vocational and Educational Training (TVET) for self-employment, apprenticeship, mentorship and coaching on self-reliance, sporting activities and talent development.

E. Education: Education promotes the social and cognitive development of children and helps them achieve a better quality of life .Our interventions targets children who have attained school going age and are enrolled in school to ensure that they overcome education barriers by focusing on access, retention and completion of education.

F. Social and Legal Protection: (shelter, children rights and care) We conduct capacity development activities for the families including child protection, parenting skills, guidance and mentorship, peer education in parenting skills and family case management plans. Child safeguarding is mainstreamed in the programming and this done through partnership with child protection structures at community, county and national level. These structures include the Local Area Advisory Councils, the Court Users Committees, paralegal networks, the police and Children's Department officers. Through these structures, we are able to monitor and intervene on Gender Based Violence, Sexual exploitation and Abuse and other forms of violence against Children.

G. Psychosocial support: We support Children to achieve emotional and social wellbeing to cope with losses and other trauma, and have good self-esteem. Children affected by HIV experience very high rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, grief, and low self-esteem. We create awareness on the available psychosocial support services within reach and conduct training and sensitization meetings for the caregivers on child counseling, mentorship on positive parenting, succession planning and life skills.