Drs. Bill and Lori Housworth have worked full time in Cambodia on healthcare development for more than 16 years. Bill is a former director of Angkor Hospital for Children, where Lori worked in various capacities including developing medical protocols and guidelines and establishing a sexual abuse clinic in a conjoint effort with the social work team. Their passion remains to see more children in need receive high quality compassionate care.
In 2017, they led a combined effort with several Cambodian colleagues to establish Chenla Children’s Healthcare in eastern Cambodia where the health statistics lagged far behind other regions in the country. At that time, in Kratie, Cambodia where they now live and work, up to 1 in 24 children died before their fifth birthday, largely from preventable and treatable causes.
Now, 8 years later, much progress has been made. Chenla has strongly contributed to a drop in mortality to 1 in 88 in Kratie and has begun work in other remote provinces with large needs and high child mortality rates. Chenla works with the Minister of Health to build up the strength of the public healthcare system rather than working parallel to it as a separate NGO. It is a unique public-private partnership model where all care is free for children who are poor. At the same time, existing government resources are leveraged to their maximum extent for the provision of care. Chenla simply contributes manpower, expertise, and long-term commitment to the cause. This results in both high efficiency of use of all resources and high sustainability of the project long term.
Chenla Children’s Health Inc is a 501(c)(3) corporation in the USA and Chenla Children’s Healthcare is officially registered as an international NGO in Cambodia both with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Health. Our mandate remains to directly build up the public sector’s ability and role in providing compassionate, high-quality healthcare to children who need it most