The 2020s have started exceptionally well for EMMS International. We end our year to March 2020 with our highest ever expenditure on our projects since EMMS International’s incorporation in 2001 as a modern healthcare charity, continuing the work of our founders of
1841. Since 2001, we have focused our work in Edinburgh, India, Malawi and Nepal and, remarkably, we start EMMS International’s 20th anniversary year working in those same countries. And at the same time as we spend more money on the work for which we were formed, and fulfil our mission to “work with partners in some of the poorest communities of the world to transform lives through compassionate, effective and sustainable healthcare,” we have trimmed our Edinburgh costs but not our expertise, and deliver greater cost-efficiency coupled with professionalism.
We see a future with real opportunity for EMMS International. We have two workstreams. Firstly, we reduce the impact of disease, for example increasing numbers of healthcare staff and helping
villagers avoid burns and snakebites by using portable solar lights. Secondly, we develop palliative care which is holistic for a low resource environment. The benefits of both are multi-faceted.
In India, in Raxaul, Bihar, our partner The Duncan Hospital, will, by 2025, have built a major new nursing college, funded by our benefactors, Jackie and Gordon Mackay. In India and Malawi, our partners will continue to support vulnerable women onto healthcare courses, helping them to earn a living while delivering compassionate, effective and sustainable healthcare to their communities. In Malawi, our Chifundo (“Compassion”) project, funded by UK Aid plus generous trusts, particularly The True Colours Trust, develops holistic palliative care for patients of remote health facilities country-wide, benefiting families and villages. In Pokhara, Nepal, we and our partner INF Nepal will open the country’s first palliative care centre of excellence, its building
generously funded by the McClay Foundation this year. Holistic palliative care gives medical, nursing, spiritual, legal and social support to families and reduces poverty.
In the 2020s, we shall continue to maximise the impact of everything entrusted to us.