Ilula Hospital
The Ilula Hospital is a 100 bed facility owned and operated by the Iringa Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania. It began in the 1930s as a health outpost and dispensary by Swedish Lutheran Missionaries and local Tanzanian Lutheran leaders.
Ilula Hospital is the regional hospital for the Kilolo District of Tanzania. Kilolo is in Iringa and has a population of about 263,000 people.
In 2002, Ilula Hospital was operating as a health center with two medical officers and several clinical officers, nursing staff and a laboratory facility. With support from the Will and Jan Carlson Foundation, an operating room was completed in 2006 allowing medical officers to perform life-saving emergency cesarean sections for women with obstructed labor. The Will and Jan Carlson Foundation was instrumental in renovating the inpatient wards and maternal health facility, as well as the construction of a trauma and x-ray building.
Ilula Hospital was designated a government district hospital. This meant an increase in resources and health care personnel. Shoulder to Shoulder also invested in training for physicians, nurses, a pharmacist, a dental technician, and a health care administrator. The Minnesota-based non-profit Global Health Ministries sent necessary medical equipment, including an ultrasound machine and dental facility. STS collaborated with St Paul Partners, a Minnesota-based non-profit, to drill a well that supplies water to the hospital and local community.
HIV Care
Also in 2006, the Clinton Foundation identified the Ilula Hospital as a site to develop one of the first rural comprehensive HIV care and treatment facilities in Tanzania. This brought infrastructure development, training, increased laboratory capability and access to free antiretroviral drugs for the thousands of people living with HIV in the area.
Education Center
The Peter J King Family Foundation funded construction of a number of other buildings on the hospital campus. This includes the Peter J King Medical Education Center. The education center includes classrooms, a library, a computer room facility, male and female dormitories, and a dining hall for the Ilula Nursing School. The nursing school originally opened as a certificate program and was upgraded in 2019 to a diploma level program. In 2020, a clinical officer training program was initiated.