A Look Back at Our First Pre-COVID-19 Program

Bulamu started as a medical camp organization, and our work has grown in scale and precision over time. Throughout these years, our team has remained focused on improving healthcare for the rural poor, with the interventions changing as we learned and responded to both opportunities and challenges.

While our Annual Reports tell the story, we wanted to share a glimpse of the work our medical camps did from 2016 until February 2020 here as well, using the tool we built to track their results over time: the Bulamu Patient Care Summary. This summarizes the patient treatments and services Bulamu provided from our first medical camp in 2016 to our last medical camp in February 2020, before we moved to our current pandemic era health systems strengthening model.

While our programs today are even more cost-effective and impactful for patients than our medical camps, we are proud of the care Bulamu’s teams provided throughout the early years of the organization. The team’s work in 2018 and 2019 in particular also led to a great deal of learning that prepared us for the pandemic environment and results in our programs today, including the Bulamu Health Center Excellence program.

With its multiple management systems interventions, the HCE program is now Bulamu’s main approach for long-term health systems strengthening with more than 150 partner health centers using HCE on an ongoing basis. Looking back, it all started with the medical camps where the team’s work is summarized here in the Bulamu Patient Care Summary.