Robert Chatterton Dickson, British High Commissioner to Bangladesh, visited the Lifebuoy Friendship Hospital (LFH) in a remote char at Sariakandi in Bogura. Zaved Akhtar, CEO and Managing Director, Unilever Bangladesh Limited (UBL), accompanied him in the visit along with Runa Khan, Executive Director of Friendship and other dignitaries.
Unilever Bangladesh Limited (UBL), the country’s leading Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) company, in collaboration with Friendship, a not-for-profit social purpose organisation, constructed a residential hospital boat with amenities for medical procedures to serve remote char communities in 2001. The LFH is fully equipped with a primary health care unit. It also has secondary health care facilities, two operation theatres, a pathological laboratory, and a digitalised X-ray room. The LFH team consists of doctors, nurses, and other medical staff who offer a wide range of services including gynaecology dentistry, ophthalmology, paediatrics, and general medicine. In addition to providing treatment, LFH also dispenses free medicine to patients and offers. In the last 20 years, LFH has delivered 1,066,671 healthcare services to 657,182 patients.
In addition to regular outpatient service delivery, LFH has organised 416 different specialised health camps conducted by national and international medical teams for the marginalised riverine communities where 16,385 successful life-changing surgeries were done. To date, LFH has provided healthcare services to over 1.5 million people living in the chars.
This visit showcased the LFH operation and programme interventions in the remote chars of Bangladesh. The delegations learned about the journey of this iconic initiative, interacted with the team who has been carrying the benevolent work in the last two decades and heard about the first-hand experience of the patients and beneficiaries. The trip also included visits to Friendship’s projects focusing on social business, governance, education and women empowerment.
