Zambia – Lusaka

500 miles has sponsored the international training of all of the qualified prosthetists and orthotists working at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka (UTH), apart from the manager.

From late 2014 to 2019, 500 miles paid UTH to make low-cost prosthetic and orthotic devices for those who could not afford to buy their own.  We paid for well over 1,300 devices for patients of UTH itself as well as referrals from other hospitals, both in Lusaka and wider Zambia.  We also funded outreach by the staff of UTH to Katete, Chitokoloki, Mongu and Monze, sometimes working in conjunction with FlySpec→

Through UTH, we had hoped to escalate our activity in Zambia in a sustainable way but unfortunately, despite our best efforts over more than five years, by January 2020, we realised we could not secure sufficient cooperation from UTH or the Zambia Ministry of Health (MoH) to continue this work.  We still hope we can still fund a few devices on an ad hoc basis but this depends on MoH supplying UTH with stock.