Caritas: Fountain of life

They reach some of Lebanon’s remotest villages, tiny settlements that even the government is not able to access. Caritas Lebanon, the biggest Catholic aid and development agency in the country, has a small fleet of mobile clinics which travel up and down the country providing health care for some 600 villages per year. Caritas Lebanon President Fr. Simon Faddoul tells Tracey McClure some of the villages are so small or so remote that there are no hospitals or public health dispensaries to serve the communities.

Caritas Lebanon’s mobile health units provided some 260,000 interventions in 2010 alone – and that, Fr. Simon says, doesn’t even come close to the number of procedures and consultations carried out in Caritas’s series of health clinics across Lebanon.

“Our stable centers offer 290,000 consultations…. 51% of the Lebanese population has no medical coverage whatsoever.”

That’s more than half of Lebanon’s four million strong population with absolutely no source of state funded healthcare or private insurance. And as the population ages, the problem is likely to get even worse, given that many people lose their health coverage at retirement.
Listen to the interview: