Bulamu’s Mission & Core Values

Bulamu’s mission is to treat the sick and strengthen health systems serving Africans most in need. Since 2016, we have treated more than 270,000 general medicine patients (including Maternal and Child Health patients), provided or arranged care for more than 8,000 total surgery patients, and developed the Health Center Excellence program, which now works on an ongoing basis to improve quality of care and management systems in more than 140 Ministry of Health facilities in Uganda.

Together, these 3 programs make up the Bulamu Health Systems Strengthening Initiative:

Our model is to treat the sick and then leverage the long-term partnerships this builds to scale our management system, the Health Center Excellence program. We focus on improving Maternal and Child Health (MCH), both for its own sake and because MCH patients make up a majority of patients served at our HCE partner facilities. Finally, Learning & Research is built into everything we do, with our programs often emerging from short-term learnings that are then further evaluated through long-term research programs.

We believe that healthcare is a human right, and we know that for healthcare to reach the poor, continuous improvement in systems and caregiving must be the culture of healthcare, not the exception. The World Health Organization estimates that about half the world’s population lack access to essential health services, and in 2015 a group of leading surgeons writing in the Lancet estimated that 5 billion people worldwide lack access to safe surgical care. This can and must improve.

The good news – and bad news – is that management systems in healthcare are often decades out of date, and that this absence of systems too often is the rule, not the exception. However, this inefficiency creates the opportunity to redesign healthcare in ways that work measurably better for the poor. Bulamu’s response is  to provide our patients and healthcare facility partners with ways of caring for the sick that are at once compassionate, outcomes-oriented, and cost-effective.

Our work shows that there are multiple opportunities for Governments and their partners to innovate in healthcare delivery, use of data, and management systems, in order to provide better healthcare for the poor. For more information, read on to learn about the values that drive our work, or visit the About Us page to learn about our programs.

Bulamu’s Values

1. A Human Right: We operate with the underlying belief that access to professional healthcare is a basic human right.
2. Culture of Caring: Create an organizational culture that puts the patient first, is consistently caring, and turns away no one in need. Teamwork: Foster a spirit of dedication, enthusiasm, and cooperation within each program that motivates our staff to help each other and give their best for the well-being of patients.
3. Clinical Excellence: Operate efficient health programs that provide today’s standard of care while using staff education and management tools to deliver continuous improvement.
4. Local Solutions: Build in-country organizational strength that can ultimately operate independently of foreign help.
5. Data-Driven: Use information technology to collect needed healthcare data, track outcomes, facilitate follow-up care, and prove the efficacy of our activities.
6. Evolve Toward Sustainability: Leverage our innovative programs to move toward economic sustainability that works effectively with local government institutions.
7. Prevention and Wellness: Serve the broader community with outreach programs that support disease prevention and healthy lifestyles.