Rebaone, a research assistant at UP manages a team of community health workers in informal settlements. Reba’s passion for helping others started in 2016 when she started working for the university as an intern.

“What I like about my job, is knowing the little we do make a huge difference in the community or for an individual,” she said. “Empowering women to stand up for themselves and stand together. However, the job does not come without challenges. One of them being cultural differences and beliefs that sometimes stand in the way of the administration of medical treatment.”

She said sometimes it was a struggle to help women to break away from unhealthy relationships as many of them did not have any relatives in the country, forcing them to stay in undesirable conditions. Some would believe their conditions to be better than having to return to their country of origin.

The programme, known as Community-Oriented Primary Care (COPC), sees the establishment of mobile health centres that provide a holistic approach to health which includes essential health care, nutritional assessment and supplementation; and health education including counselling.

Her job includes the oversight of services offered on-site and in communities which includes patient visits at their homes, data collection and analysis, facilitating the training of community members and health personnel and reporting on such services to inform health strategies.

She works with families at informal settlements such as Woodlane Village (Plastic View) and Cemetery View in the east of Pretoria as well as Melusi and Zama-Zama in the west of Pretoria.

Click here to view the full article; https://rekord.co.za/386353/making-a-healthy-difference-at-informal-settlements