EPI Community Outreach Team
Blessing addresses a crowd of students about vaccinations.
Blessing is a nurse completing her second year at the Karanda Nurse Training School. In one year’s time, she and her school mates will graduate to become registered general nurses with the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health and Child Care.
The school assembly over, the children swarm to their classrooms. Some of them line up outside one of the classrooms …. because today is Vaccination Day.
This is the Zimbabwean Expanded Program of Immunization (EPI) team: A Karanda team of four move to schools and community meeting points to provide infant vaccines, HPV vaccination for young girls, and COVID-19 shots for all children and adults.
Outside mothers are lining up with their young babies to have them weighed and measured by a community health worker who partners with Karanda Hospital. She is screening them for malnutrition and will refer them to the hospital if needed.
The mobile unit operates out of Karanda Mission Hospital. KMH is an institution with a seventy-year history, committed to health education and preventative medicine, and to improve awareness on general medical and surgical conditions in its communities.
