Our Clinic mainly serves the people of Joe Slovo in Milnerton and a few other people from the surrounding areas.  The community of Joe Slovo is a friendly and truly appreciative one.  The clinic is run on a 'lavish' Mobile clinic which parks opposite the  local shopping market.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a constructed waiting area and our patients wait underneath the stars or rain! We go out every Wednesday night and by the end of the night we have usually seen close to 30 patients and sometimes up to 40 patients!!!   We all have a ball on this clinic and even have our very own, paeds clinic which is mostly run by 5th year students. Overall, this clinic is a great one and the  people truly appreciate the service we provide them with.

The Joe Slovo Clinic is run on a mobile clinic that goes out every Wednesday and is situated near Milnerton. Joe Slovo is an informal settlement and the community is mostly Xhosa speaking but we do get the occasional Afrikaans speaking patients (great place to practice these languages). On a regular day we see between 30-40 patients and on some occasions we had more than 50 patients and had to turn them away, but we never turn away the little kiddies. The buses leave at 18h00 outside the new learning centre in the Health sciences faculty. The clinic runs from 18h30 till 21h00-22h00, depending on the number of patients we have. We park inside the local high school and make use of some of the classrooms as a waiting area for our patients. This is a major improvement from the previous years when our patients used to wait in the open and get rained on in the winter nights. Since most of our patients are children, we have paeds clinics which are run by 5th and 6th year medical students. Previously we used to open another classroom to be used for the children, but now that we have two mobiles every night we use 2 cubicles for paeds and the other 6 for adults. The great thing about Joe Slovo is that we have clinical students and doctors who love teaching and our regular doctors Dr Nordien, Weinreigh, Parollis, Ntusi, Abrahams and Van-Zyl Smit really enjoy the clinics and enjoy teaching the students. They are warm towards patients and students and very patient too.

Most importantly we try our best to make the students, international or local, to feel at home, enjoy the clinic and learn as much as possible. Last but not least there are cookies and drinks after every clinic :-).

Innocentia, Clinic head (2009).