NEWSLETTER - KENYA SCHOOL FOR INTEGRATED MEDICINE …

4Kenia Trust Registered Trustees • P.O. Box 147 • 80403 KWALE • Tel: 0724 567 981

[email protected] • www.4kenya.org

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NEWSLETTER - KENYA SCHOOL FOR INTEGRATED MEDICINE Year 13, number 21, June 2019

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear all, Greetings from Kwale! We’re glad to share with you about our developments of the past 6 months. We would like to thank all our friends and supporters who have stood by us for so long as the school has grown to where it is today. It wouldn’t have happened without the support of many people. We have been very grateful in the last months for the wonderful financial support of the Robbins Family Foundation, in California, USA. Thanks to all the great efforts from our dear friend Gisela Kissing and her team from the Lions Club, Berlin-Bellevue-Charlottenburg we have been able to raise a generous amount to improve our water management as well as to make necessary improvements to the school. Warm regards, Marie and the 4Kenya team

Teaching and Admin 4kenya staff members



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UPDATE SCHOOL The first six months of this year have been extremely busy on all fronts. We have been very active with our project supported by the European Union, working with the Ministry of Health in Kwale County. As this is the last year of the project, we are now analysing all our activities in the community and the impact of our actions. In April we were visited by our EU delegation from Nairobi for four days. These experiences are always interesting (and challenging) as all our work in the field and the school are being closely evaluated. However, they were positive about the work being achieved.

As we are now looking toward the end of the project, our focus is very much on the future of the school and the courses we want to offer. In the last 10 years, the school has evolved from being a homeopathic school to also offering courses in Nutrition and Community Health, which very much fits into our holistic vision. New Courses and methods of learning We are expanding our curriculums and will include Counselling Psychology, Community Development and Social Work, Information Communication Technology and Health Informatics and continuing with Community Health and Nutrition.

We are in the midst of a marketing drive in the whole coastal region of Kenya to attract new students for our September intake. We are also working on more blended learning options so people from afar can attend our school. We want to combine our training model so part of the learning can be online and part on site.



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Kenya is developing fast, including its online capacity and many schools currently offer blended learning and distance learning programmes. We are also looking at our teaching methods and moving more toward a competency-based learning approach, with less focus on didactic learning and teacher centered learning. We were also advised by PUM (Manager Deployment Programme, Netherlands), a professional management company that offers professional support and advice for non-profit organizations world-wide. They visited us in December 2019 and spent five days with us and together we came with the three main areas of development:

• 21st century curriculum design • Action plan E learning • Action plan digital health expert centre

Since then we have been looking at how we can implement these areas, which is one reason we are looking at ICT and Health Informatics as well as developing curriculums and learning styles that are more holistic. With the support of CDACC, we are going to offer our teachers a training programmed in competency-based learning so they can embrace these concepts more easily. Digital technology for case analysis We have also been working on creating a digital platform for homeopathic outcomes, which are described below in the Health Information Systems section. Regards homeopathy, we are planning to offer a post graduate programme for existing medical personnel. This can also be a blended learning approach, which would suit existing professionals already working. We feel this method is a more effective means to introduce homeopathy to the medical community and those already having some medical experience and basic knowledge. Ideally, we want to work with an existing Kenyan university and offer the programme as a post-graduate diploma or degree. Academic Day and hostel opening We recently had an Academic Day where we also opened our new hostel for 88 students which we have named after our dear late Principal Esther Gitahi. This was a big occasion and the Deputy Governor of Kwale County was the chief guest and who opened the hostel. The Minister of Health and Minister of Education in Kwale County also attended along with over 60 parents of students at the school. The event was televised by national TV.



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Visiting interns This year has also been busy with interns. We had three nutrition interns for 3 months, who already have a degree in Nutrition and are now doing their formal community-based internship. Four more will come in the next weeks. We have a degree ICT intern as well and two younger interns who are learning the basics of ICT. We also were visited by our long-term homeopathic colleague from Holland, Annelie Smits, who has been supporting the school for many years.

We had five Dutch medical students with us for two months, doing a research project on our community health strategy. They gained valuable knowledge of Community Health and Health information systems as well as simply being in Kenya and the surroundings.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ COMMUNITY HEALTH STRATEGY We have continued to explore how the national community health strategy works in the field as we support 24 community units in the county, working directly with community health volunteers in collecting health data and in implementing training programmes at community level. We continue to pay monthly stipends to these workers as they are classified as volunteers yet do important work. In some of these areas we work in, people are very needy and have many challenges in accessing healthcare. Permaculture and Natural Medicines Trainings Our job as part of the Community Health Strategy is to support these communities and ideally to help improve their health through improved health knowledge and through other activities such as learning about natural medicine and permaculture. We are working on two plots of land, where local people are now able to plant seeds and grow their own food, all organically.



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We are teaching the 240 Community Health Volunteers about the use of Artemisia annua to treat and prevent malaria, the use of natural mosquito repellent creams, how to treat diarrhea and many other things, including treating skin conditions and wounds. We introduce them to the concepts of Natural Medicine and of course embed homeopathic philosophy into this. In fact, all the volunteers have already been given a two-day introduction to homeopathy some months ago. The natural medicine concepts we are working with now are based on using available plant medicines are common to the area and which can be used easily by people. We use the work of ANAMED (Action for Natural Medicine), a Christian organization that has worked for many years in Africa. Their book, Natural Medicine in the Tropics is a valuable resource of knowledge, from everything like using the sap of papaya to using chili powder, Artemisia, Moringa and many other things. It also talks about cultivation of these plants which is important in communities where you rely on what you grow.

It is also part of a model for self-reliance in communities we are trying to support. As modern medicine has become more available, and free in government facilities, many people resort to going to the facility for the least ailment, developing a culture of dependency and which can often lead to unnecessary medications being given. As with many parts of the world, anti-microbial resistance is a serious issue due to the overuse of antibiotics. Also, traditional cultural values, including the use of natural medicines are easily dismissed when the allure of “modern” medicines are being made available. As our project has embraced the national Community Health Strategy in Kenya and also that we are part of eight global health projects around the world, we are going to a conference in Bangladesh in October. Here we will represent our project and the work we are doing in Community Health. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



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HEALTH INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND DHIS2 TRACKER We are continuing to work hard with our health information system, called DHIS2 tracker. This technology allows community health workers to collect health data using smart phones instead of the old log book system with all its inefficiencies. We have supplied phones and wifi hotspots to the community and data is now being collected and analysed. We are looking to synchronize this data with the national DHIS2 database to see how well our data can be integrated in the national system. We have been learning a lot about health informatics during this project and the potential importance of this technological innovation and it has become a significant development in our project. Homeopathic tracker app We have also designed a version of the DHIS2 tracker for homeopathic data. We are collecting all the outcome data from our mobile clinics, saving it on the server and then using the technology to make an outcome analysis of the impact of homeopathic treatment.

We are hoping to make this available for homeopaths throughout the world so data on homeopathic outcomes can be put into the database from anywhere in the world. As we look for ways to show how homeopathy can have an impact in Africa and elsewhere, we feel that clinical outcomes are the best way to show the work and produce evidence of the impact of homeopathy. Although this is a work in progress we hope to be able to demonstrate this system to the community soon.



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We are attending the Homeopathic Research Institute conference in London in June 2019 and along with our colleagues in Swaziland, we will be showing the results of all our clinical work in both Swaziland and Kenya. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ COMMUNITY CLINICS We run 4 homeopathy clinics, including one in our school, which feed into 18 mobile clinics that we visit monthly. This is part of our project and ties into the community strategy by offering health options at a community level. We travel to remote parts of the county, where transportation is a big issue and offer mobile clinics homeopathic and nutritional services. All the clinics are collecting data on an Access data base where we can monitor the impact of the clinics and the efficacy of homeopathy. The clinics are based mostly in the community units we work in, so this service is an important part of our community strategy action plan. We have now treated over 4,000 people in the county. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ RESEARCH Part of our project has required us to do research in the field on the impact and significance of an integrated approach to healthcare. One of our partner schools in Kilifi County north of Mombasa has done 4 researches, varying from looking at the function of traditional birth attendants, traditional bone setters, mental care in Kwale County and the use of diet and home remedies. Along with our homeopathic partner in Tanzania, HHA, we are also doing research in the homeopathic treatment of ringworm and deaf children. We have also had Dutch medical students coming here in the last two years where they did research into the impact of the community health strategy and our DHIS2 tracker. Finally, with our research on clinical outcomes in all our clinics, we are hoping that this research will produce the evidence we need to show that homeopathy and an integrated approach to healthcare in our part of Kenya shows a positive impact. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ KENYAN SOCIETY OF HOMEOPATHS AND NEW HEALTH ACT IN KENYA We are continuing to support the Kenyan Society of Homeopaths and our goal to represent homeopathy with the Kenyan government. We established a national accreditation exam which all the members took to establish a baseline and to be able to show the government the standards we have established.



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Currently we are waiting to be consulted by the Technical Working Committee to discuss standards of education and accreditation with the government. Our goal is to become the professional body representing homeopathy in the country and to set up new national standards of regulation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ FUNDRAISING NEEDS New Academic Center As our school evolves to the next level, we anticipate having 250-300 students by September 2019. We are planning to build a new Academic Centre that will be able to cater for this expansion. The building will have more administrative offices, a big staff room, along with an examination room and a board room. It will also have a conference/class room which will be needed as we will have 8 different classes running at the same time. We have consulted an architect and he has estimated that the cost of the building will be 100,000 euros. Community cooker We are exploring the use of a community cooker to cook our food on. It involves recycling rubbish from the community and using it instead of firewood. Kenya has a serious wood shortage and it is expensive and extremely damaging to the environment. Recurrent droughts and water shortage are partly due to the destruction of remaining woodland areas in Kenya. For the sustainability of the school, we need to also look for economic solutions to the costs of food production. Therefore, we are now looking to invest in this innovative technology to create a community cooker in our kitchen so we can feed 300 people daily in an economic and environmentally sustainable way. However, investment in this technologically costs up to 10,000 euros. 4Kenya Revolving Higher Education Loan Board (HELB) Fund Our students are gratefully making use of our HELB loans and we are raising more funds in order to give opportunities to many under privileged students. We are targeting to invest another 20,000 euro into this Fund. For donations please visit: http://www.kenyaschoolforintegratedmedicine.org/donate/

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NEWSLETTER - KENYA SCHOOL FOR INTEGRATED MEDICINE …