So far SOS Children's Villages has set up over fifty medical centres outside of Europe in order to help people who have little or no access to medical facilities. These centres are attached to SOS Children's Villages and are able to provide basic local medical needs, cover specialist needs such as obstetrics and provide preventative medical services.
The aim of the SOS Medical Centres is to improve the standards of public health in the local communities, to play a preventive role through information and vaccination programmes, to reduce infant mortality rates, to stabilize and feed up undernourished children and to provide first aid in the case of accidents.
The clinics are open seven days a week and normally offer out-patient treatment and preventive medicine (vaccinations, courses on hygiene, prophylactics, nutrition, first aid etc). Many clinics also have their own laboratory, a small ward and a pharmacy. They have a qualified staff of state registered nurses, midwives, laboratory technicians and doctors.
SOS Children's Villages also operates mother-and-child clinics, which offer ante- and post-natal care as well as childbirth facilities, plus the necessary vaccinations for babies. In order to improve awareness of the need for a high standard of ante- and post-natal medical care, expectant mothers and mothers with babies are issued with record cards for their visits and the treatment and vaccinations received. In addition SOS Children's Villages builds small dental clinics and medical facilities for handicapped children and youngsters.
One of the biggest challenges of the past few years and for the future has been and will be the dramatic increase in HIV/AIDS. This is especially the case in many African countries but also in some Asian countries and even in Latin American. The rate of HIV infections has taken on such proportions that the social basis, the economic strength and the inner structures of whole communities have been weakened. They now stand before changes, which the individual countries are unable to cope with.
The SOS Medical Centres must also develop new concepts and strategies in order to be able to react to the changing demands. An increasing number of information campaigns about the risk of infection and against discrimination against AIDS infected people are being carried out in many of the medical centres, especially in the African countries. Advice and support is being offered to the relatives of people with HIV as well as medical treatment for those infected.