Hilde Meijs
BHF Fellow
My name is Hilde Meijs and I live in the Netherlands. I am 67 years old. My three children have spread their wings and left home.
I started my career as a physiotherapist. I lived and worked in Lesotho and Ethiopia apart from the Netherlands and became very interested in culture and cultural differences. Living and working in Africa continued to fascinate me. After 10 years in physiotherapy and returning from Ethiopia, I switched to management in healthcare – psychiatry, hospital and elderly care – and was director of a vocational training centre.
Since this year, I have been coordinator for PUM in the health care sector for all African countries. PUM provides knowledge and expertise in 50 sectors of the economy. Their senior experts voluntarily share knowledge with entrepreneurs in some 25 countries to create vibrant businesses and better lives. There are about 1,800 people available as experts for PUM. In healthcare we have 110 experts.
Through PUM, I am associated with the Busoga Health Forum as a healthcare expert. The forum works with a lot of members and tries to use their members’ knowledge and expertise whenever possible. Several projects are running in the Busoga Health Forum. Family planning is the largest and reaches over 100,000 people in the region through app groups, talks, webinars, as well as drama shows and radio talks.
I see opportunities in using tele-health to reach more people and bring care to remote areas, where there are few specialised professionals and distances are long to reach professional care.
Another way to make care reachable and accessible is by training healthcare workers in remote areas for specific interventions, which once trained can be performed independently at their location. For both topics, we made concrete plans during the 2 weeks I was in Jinja.
My warm regards,
Hilde
