Travelling long distance to access better medical assistance for the Mashamba community members will now hopefully become just a memory. This comes after the executive mayor of Vhembe District Municipality, Cllr Mdaka, officially opened the newly built clinic in the area last Tuesday.

According to Mdaka, the building of the new clinic at Mashamba was part of the Limpopo Department of Health and Social Development´s Clinic Building and Upgrading Programme (CBUP).

“In Limpopo alone, more than 220 Public Health Clinics (PHP) were built or refurbished. This figure includes 185 new clinics, which were built largely through the CBUP programme,” he said.

He said the government was in the process of upgrading about 27 clinics in five districts of Limpopo and Vhembe in particular. “I am also pleased to say that these clinics are within a 5km radius of communities. Access to PHP services as measured by headcounts has increased systematically in our province from 23 million to 150 million,” Mdaka said.

Although there used to be a small clinic in the Mashamba area, it was unable to cater for all the seven villages in the area, which included Mashamba, Tshivhu-yuni, Zama-Zama and many others. This forced the people of Mashamba to travel long distances to the Elim Hospital in order to access medical assistance.

The newly built clinic, according to the women in the village, is a great relief and better than the old clinic because pregnant women were forced to use a small rondavel as the maternity ward. “The maternity rondavel was very small and not adequate. As mothers we deserve better and we really appreciate the new clinic,” said one of the women.

According to Mdaka, the newly built and improved clinics in the entire province have led to a significant improvement in service delivery and health conditions. “These successes are a result of the determination of our health workers to deliver services to our people,” he said.