02/04/2026
OKURYANGAVA CLINIC STARTS 24/7 OPERATION 🎉🙌🏿
BUILDING SYSTEMIC CHANGE ONE STEP AT A TIME
The Ministry of Health and Social Services is pleased to announce that OKURYANGAVA Clinic is now open 24 hours a day!
Last month, the Ministry of Health announced that Maxuilili Clinic was added as a second 24 hour clinic for the Region. Okuryangava clinic is now the third. For years, residents of the capital city and surrounding communities have relied on one health center (Katutura Health Center otherwise known as “Blackchain”) alone for 24 hour services. This caused extreme congestion at the facility and drastically affected the quality of health services afforded to citizens. The announcement of Maxuilili clinic as a second 24 hour clinic brought significant relief, but it still did not fully resolve the issues of congestion. The Ministry undertook to expand the decongestion strategy to include Okuryangava clinic in order to further relieve pressure. As of the 1st April 2026, the Okuryangava clinic is officially the third 24 hour functioning health center/clinic level facility for the region.
“We can achieve the health system we all desire. We just have to be intentional about our actions.” Said the Executive Director
“We are pushing for systems change. Not modular change. We sat with the teams and zoomed in on what we need to further do in order to decongest the system and not just one facility. These intentional efforts not only divide the previous pressure that was on one facility amongst three facilities, but they also reduce the burden on Katutura State Hospital which is fed by these facilities. Expanding service hours means that instead of 100 people being seen in 8 hours at one facility, 100 people can be seen at three facilities. Instead of 50 people rushing and queueing up because the clinic only opens at 08h and closes at 17h, patients can now be seen through the day and cleared simultaneously. That means that instead of a long queue at 08h because no patients were being seen throughout the night, patients are cleared throughout the entire day.” Said the Honorable Minister
In order to enable the clinic to operate on a 24-hour basis, the Ministry had to address human resource shortages, strengthen equipment capacity, and reform facility culture and operational processes. This speaks to the Ministry’s ongoing decentralization strategy. This strategy will gradually be expanded to other regions to ensure systemic replicable change.