Keep a Child Alive

A Superwoman of KCA

Picture, for a moment, a woman who has an acclaimed medical degree, a personal letter of appreciation from Nelson Mandela and who received an international award in New York for her accomplishments, alongside stars like U2’s Bono? Where would this woman live and work and how would she be?
 
Meet Dr. Pasquine Ogunsanya, Medical Director at Alive Medical Services and relentless fighter for health care for Uganda’s poorest. Dr. Pasquine has made it her mission to provide medical care to those who need it most: since 2005 she has helped thousands of HIV-positive patients and their families in one of the poorest areas of Kampala back to health.
 
“I was born in Uganda, but went abroad, to Russia, to study for my medical degree. That’s where I met my husband, Adebiyi Ogunsanya, a Nigerian medical student, and we fell in love and married. Initially, we thought about going back to Nigeria together, but we saw that there was more need in Uganda at that time. Around 1997, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was at its peak here and people were dying left and right. So in 2002 we started working in the slums, in a smaller clinic, doing community medical services, developing prevention schemes and lobbying with the Kampala City Council and the Ministry of Health to get support in our community especially in the area of HIV/AIDS. A group of American students heard about us and took back our story to Keep a Child Alive and Alicia Keys. In December 2005 we started with only 6 patients at that small medical center, and in 2007 Keep a Child Alive moved the program to a bigger premises: Alive Medical Services and we were up to 2,000!”
 
Today, Dr. Pasquine and her team count 7,000 patients in their files, but they are far from satisfying the need for services. “There is so much need that we have already outgrown the premises. There is a nearby building that we would like to integrate into our clinic. We need more consultation rooms and a larger space for the waiting area.” With so much on her mind, she finds it hard to relax and get her mind off work. “That’s a challenge! My last holiday was to Nigeria in 2008,“ she says. “I work at the clinic every day during the week. I have the weekends off, but the time is filled with housekeeping, shopping and family. And since my husband and I work together, we tend to take work home. While I am more of a manager, he is more of the strategic leader. He has a clear vision of the direction things should be moving and I take care of the execution. It’s just the nature of our work; if you are taking care of people in the way we do, you can never stop working!”
 
Alive Medical Services is a community-based medical center in Kampala, Uganda where Dr. Pasquine and her husband Dr. Adebiyi Ogunsanya, oversee the care of children and families affected by HIV/AIDS.   When KCA first began supporting this small clinic, no one could have anticipated that it would grow in just six years to serve 400 patients a day.  Today, Alive Medical Services is a clinic of excellence with its doors always open to anyone in need - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  In the last year alone, AMS has seen an increase of 1000 patients, all of whom learned about the clinic through word of mouth in the community.  1 in every 4 people who come to the clinic for testing are found to be HIV-positive, and they have immediate access to comprehensive care.
 
In addition to serving the immediate urban community in Namuwongo, people travel for hours from the most rural villages in Uganda to reach the Alive Medical Services clinic, because it is known as a place that transforms the lives of patients with HIV/AIDS every day. Alive Medical Services is a model of HIV care in the capital city of Kampala, providing free comprehensive HIV/AIDS treatment, nutritional support, prevention of mother-to-child transmission services, family planning and urgently-needed volunteer counseling and testing (VCT) to a community that would otherwise have no access to care.
 
When asked about her personal goals for the future, Dr. Pasquine quickly reverts to goals for her work. “We need to expand our medical center and get more staff. We can help so many more people,” she says and at every encounter with a client we integrate prevention . We want every client and every Ugandan to take a stand to be a point of prevention. It is clear that she has dedicated her life fully to the cause. Her immense drive will continue to move mountains in search for means to prevent, treat and take care of people living with HIV/AIDS.