Afya Care Executive Director Calisters Wekesa during a mental health awareness session with students at Busia. Photo: Easy Pixels.
Over the weekend, Afya Care Foundation, which focuses on metal health education and awareness entered into partnership with Aspire Integrated Healthcare Solutions to provide their service on mental wellness to the marginalized populations including youths and refugees.
According to the Executive Director Calisters Wekesa Simiyu, the partnership is a result of their efforts in championing of mental well-being in the society and the shunned youths across the country, disadvantaged to access of mental health education.
“The partnership has come to foster the impact of what we are doing in Kenya, but we are going to work with them with refugees across African countries, and basically we are dealing with mental well-being of the refugees. We are currently working with refugees in Kakuma. This partnership will also help us use their tools to be able to access our people especially the underserved people in our community,” he said.
He further said through the partnership, they are piloting an App by Aspire Integrated Healthcare Solutions to establish any traces of developing mental health illness among students. Additionally, the App will pilot in Kakuma t0 access how many refugees have been affected with mental health.
“We are launching a new app that we have started to pilot, this lab was acquired through our partnership. The App has features whereby you can be able to detect whether the students is developing mental health issues,” Wekesa explained.
The introduction of Electronic Medical Record system (EMR), which was implemented on Friday, May 16, an electronic system that will help preserve data, access the number of students affected in the country and roll out to the whole country will be implemented soon.
EMR system is a tool to see how it can effectively access the data of students affected with mental health in the country, and it will be rolled across the country, as well as show the of the impact of what we doing. These are just some of the few great things that will come with the partnership,” he remarked.
Afya Care also champions for the implementation of preventive measures against drug and substance abuse among youths, which is readily available to them, that has since ben a result of mental health issues.
