Call 2 Care - Leave No One Behind with Healthcare and our Mobile Clinic Initiative!

Our community members waiting for their assessments just outside the mobile clinic

Earlier this month, we launched our first-ever mobile health clinic initiative at FJ Le Roux farm. 

This has been a project that has been in the works for a while, with the help and support of our partners in the initiative: Market Demand Fruit, Guud Global and made possible by the Waitrose Foundation. 

Through our collective efforts and more admin than we thought we’d ever see, we deployed a state-of-the-art mobile medical truck to the farm.

Farm workers and their families could walk in for free check-ups, get eye tests and glasses on the spot, and personalised health advice without travelling long distances.

The advanced Guud mobile clinic can perform vision, hearing, and general wellness checks on-site.

By bringing care to the farm, we reduced barriers of distance and cost, exactly the advantage of mobile clinics, which can often easily and quickly navigate to places where healthcare services are hard to reach, or in areas where people don’t have the means to get to their closest clinic. 

The vision centre inside the truck had optometrists and equipment to screen eyesight and fit glasses immediately.

On-the-spot dispensing of prescription glasses means a patient can have their vision assessed and walk out seeing clearly, often with the first pair of glasses they’ve ever owned.

For context, a mobile clinic in Ghana recently screened 315 people last month and dispensed 62 glasses in a single event, and we aspire to reach that number very soon.

Ethan; with his first pair of prescription glasses!

Our hearing screening auditory room also allowed us to perform audiometry tests and provide hearing aid fittings. Advances like smartphone hearing-test apps enable precise assessments on the spot, followed by fitting of low-cost hearing aids. 

This approach is critical given that only about 2% of people in Africa who need hearing aids actually have them.

By offering on-site hearing tests and aid fitting, we are trying to help bridge that gap for our community.

Beyond eyes and ears, the team provided general wellness checks. We monitored blood pressure, blood sugar, and other vital signs, offering immediate advice or referrals as needed. Crucially, our team from Guud gave individuals personalised health talks on nutrition, hygiene, and disease prevention during their sessions.

Delivering education alongside care is a known benefit of mobile health programs; for example, many mobile clinics conduct group sessions on safe water, nutrition and other preventative topics; and as we grow in the space, we are hopeful that we will add to our offerings. 

The community warmly received the mobile clinic. Many farm workers thanked us for bringing healthcare directly to their fields, and for exposing them to equipment and possible health conditions they would otherwise have no idea about! 

A few of the community members also mentioned that families often lack money, the know-how or transport to reach specialists, so an on-site mobile clinic fills a vital gap.

By the end of the day, many of the clinic attendees, including children, left with new eyeglasses or hearing aids, and many more had received screenings or counselling.

These services brought healthcare to a rural area that might otherwise be neglected.

Globally, about half of the world’s population still lacks access to essential health services; so our mobile clinic initiative and outreach advance the goal of universal health coverage.

For our team, just being able to have the privilege to witness one person see or hear better (especially for the first time) was a powerful reminder of the impact we try to achieve in all our work. 

Our farming community and mobile clinic project aligns with our mission to improve lives through community outreach and education. It also advances multiple Sustainable Development Goals. 

Most directly, it serves SDG 3: good health and well-being, which aims to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all.

By delivering care directly to farming communities, we help achieve target 3.8 of the SDGs, which is universal health coverage - access to essential healthcare for everyone. 

Equally, our project embodies SDG 17: partnerships for the goals. 

Market Demand Fruits is based 70 km outside Cape Town. They are one of South Africa’s biggest citrus suppliers and exporters. Their team works closely with farmers, farm workers, and community partners. They help us navigate the farms and give us access to the people we need to reach. They believe their farm workers are the backbone of their business. We have proudly partnered with them to support social initiatives that uplift their community.

The Waitrose Foundation created this initiative and funds the project. They focus on empowering farm communities through education and health projects chosen by the worker committees.

They now partner with more than 560 farms and support thousands of people through community-led programmes.

These collaborations show how multi-stakeholder partnerships can multiply impact in rural development.

Our mobile clinic is just the beginning for us.

We plan to expand the program to other farms, adding services like dental screenings, chronic-disease management, and continued preventive education. Each clinic builds trust within the community and provides data for better planning. 

By leveraging partnerships and aligning with the SDGs, our team and efforts are creating sustainable change.

We will keep rolling out this initiative as long as we have the funds to and we will follow this model to ensure that no one in the rural areas is left behind.

A parent and child getting assessed in the mobile clinic