KIU, Western Campus – The Uganda Medical Association (UMA) is currently running a fundraising drive for Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), which was launched on June 16 at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in Kampala.

The drive, whose launch was graced by the Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng, is aimed at raising funds to procure enough PPE, through two initiatives; from the public and with SWIPEPAY-a mobile payment facility- through the #10challenge, according to a press statement from the association.

The fundraising drive hopes to raise more funds to procure enough PPEs for health workers, who are at the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 27 of them already being diagnosed with the disease in Uganda.

UMA also revealed that they had secured 175 million worth of funding from the Open Society Initiative in Eastern Africa, which they used to buy PPEs that they will distribute through their 14 branches countrywide, as a way of supporting the national COVID-19 response.

PPE has been a major challenge in the global fight against COVID-19, with health workers all over the world expressing their dissatisfaction at the failure by their governments to provide adequate PPE, thereby putting their lives at risk. 

This effort by the UMA will go a long way in ensuring that the country’s COVID-19 frontline health workers get adequate gear to protect themselves from infection.

Medscape, a health information website, on June 18 published a list of names of more than 1,000 health workers all over the world have died from COVID-19, with more than 90,000 being infected, according to Reuters.

Picture credit: UMA