Ubuntu clinic for moms and babies soon to be micro-franchised -Most of our clients are from Cosmo City

A passion for caring for people led Freda Makanete to open a clinic that started in a Wendy house.

Ubuntu Health Care Clinic is a mother and baby clinic. We provide a service to women who mostly don’t want to go to the public sector clinics owing to the time they spend there. So the service we offer is antenatal care for pregnant women. We take good care of them throughout their pregnancy. Should there be any complications, because it’s a midwife practice, we refer them to obstetricians in government hospitals. And for those with medical aid, we refer to the private sector. As a midwife my duty is to just go through the primary healthcare of the mother and, should there be any complications, it is my duty to refer them to the obstetrician – that’s why we then refer them to the hospital.

So that’s what a public clinic would be like. The midwife in the public space would then refer to the obstetrician; that’s how we work. After the mother gives birth she will be coming back. So birth will be for those who want to go to public sector. Mostly we don’t have mothers who give birth in the private sector, since we don’t have obstetricians we work with directly to take care of the mom through the antenatal period, and then the mothers only go there to give birth.

Usually we will see them early in their pregnancy and then later on they will go to the obstetrician. Most of our moms deliver in Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital, and then others at Johannesburg General and Hillbrow. Most of our clients are from Cosmo City, so those from that area will deliver in Rahima Moosa. Depending on where the woman lives, we refer them to hospitals according to their address, because that’s how the referral system works with public hospitals.

After they give birth they will come to us for their three-day check-up. We don’t do the HIV programme as yet, so we still refer them for that. Should a mother be found to be HIV-positive antenatally, we refer her to be initiated on ARVs, although the moms still prefer to come back to us for antenatal check-ups, and continue their ARV check-ups with the public sector. So even after birth we do advise them. They will come back for their six-week check-up and, if they can pay, we do the PCR test. But if they can’t pay we refer them back to the government institutions.

Immunisation and wellness check-ups for moms and babies

Then we also offer immunisation services for the babies, and the moms come back for their six-week check-ups as well, for a Pap smear. We will continue with them if they want to do contraception as well. There are other little things that we also do, like wellness check-ups. So if the mom is on blood pressure tablets or wants to check her blood pressure with us, we do blood pressure and sugar tests because at times there are complications with moms who are pregnant, and we find they have diabetes or hypertension. So if that needs to be monitored we do monitor that as well.

Then with the babies we provide services for them until they are 12 years old with their vaccinations. For our vaccines we partly get our stock from the government side and we don’t charge much for it; we charge just for the consultation fee and not for the vaccines. But there are other vaccines like the chicken pox vaccine, the MMR vaccine, that you find in the private sector. So we buy those vaccines and then we charge. So we do see cash clients and medical aid clients.