Shree Jain Community Plans To Build A 500m Hospital In Thika.

Thika-based Shree Jain Youth League has announced plans to put up a Ksh. 500 million fully fledged hospital in Thika Town, subject to the availability of at least 5 acres of land.

This was revealed by Mr. Rajan Shah, a board Trustee member, on the opening day of the Free Shah Eye and ENT Camp at Chania Girls High School.

Rajan said that the hospital is intended to be a non-profit making hospital that will generally be targeting the poor and the less privileged in the society. 


“We have set aside about Sh. 150m-200m to put up the first phase of the project, basically be fully-fledged eye and ENT hospital that will target poor people who cannot afford the costs of treatment in the regular hospitals. Our charges will be quite minimal so as to benefit as many needy persons as possible. Our only challenge is the availability of land,” said Raj.


He added that they had engaged both the Kiambu Government and the area MP Alice Ng’ang’a to try and work out a solution to the acquisition of such land.


Concerning the camp, Raj revealed that this being their 37^th Camp, the community had planned to screen 20,000 cases, operate on about 600-700 cases and provide 5,000 pieces of reading glasses during the 10 days.


Last year, the camp attended 19,000 cases.


Eleven (11) volunteer doctors, six (6) eye and five (5) ENT specialists had travelled from India to come and assist in this outreach screening programme.


They had cases from far and wide where they went out of their way to provide transport and boarding facilities to patients from Kisumu, Siaya, Kitui and Makueni County.


Among the cases they were handling included simple operations for raptured ears, cleft lips among others. Majority of these cases would otherwise have costed these patients between Ksh. 20,000 and 100,000 in the regular hospitals.


“The large number of people visiting the camp is an indicator that we have a very big population suffering at home for lack of financial ability to access medical attention in our hospitals. We can only do little to help the situation. This then calls for the government, both national and county, to partner with people like us to see to it that we increase the reach to these cases. We are also appealing to our own Kenyan doctors to volunteer in such programmes as part of their community involvement in giving back to the society,” said Raj.

Shree Jain Youth League is also involved in other community programmes such as paying bursaries to needy students and buying wheelchairs to assist the physically challenged. In December 2015, they handed over an abolition block to Chania Girls High School that was worth Ksh. 3 million.

The few patients we talked to at the camp were very grateful to the organisers adding that were it not for them, they would have lived with their ailments without medical attention due to lack of funds.