Maua Hospital Service Fund

Maua Methodist Hospital provides healthcare for a district of 800,000 people. We are the only full service healthcare provider. Each month, we give lifesaving healthcare to inpatients, who have little or no funds. Many of these patients are orphans, abandoned children, and children of impoverished families. As AIDS is an endemic in our area with an estimated prevalence rate of over 15%. We serve many AIDS orphans. We give the families or caretakers of this patient (if one exist) invoices stating the amount of the healthcare, we provide in hopes that they can find someone who can help them pay these costs. In an average month, we give $360,000 of invoices for which we usually receive little or no reimbursement. In one year, we will give about $360,000 worth of medical care, medicine, and food to the indigent children and other patients. Maua Methodist Hospital relies on patient fees for our day-to-day operating expenses. About one third of our patients come from families with little or no disposable income, and they cannot afford to pay for hospital care. We want to serve these people as we are in mission for Jesus Christ who calls us to serve the poor. However, we have found that without outside contribution to subsidize the care of indigent patients, we were in grave danger of bankruptcy as the medicine, food, and medical care all cost money. We found that we could not pay our staff salaries in a timely manner, and we could not afford to pay for the necessary drugs for patient care. If the situation were to continue in this manner, we would have no choice but to refuse medical care to the poor or to continue for until the lack of funds forced us to close the hospital. This would leave our district of Kenya with a population of 800,000 with no local full service medical care. Christian medical facilities provides 40% of the medical care in Kenya and the people of our country depend heavily on us for their medical needs. Presently, we are serving our area and continuing to offer inpatient services to the poor because of the service fund donations. We will serve approximately 12,000 inpatients this year for which about one third are poor.