REHEMA hospice and clinic
In Swahili, Rehema means Mercy
Rehema Deaconess Elizabeth, Patient Agnes, and Always Mercy Deaconess Pamela enjoying the morning sunshine
A place of healing. A place of rest. A place of refuge.
The doors of mercy are swinging wide open in western Kenya at Rehema Hospice and Clinic. Rehema is a place of refuge for those suffering in body and soul from chronic and life-threatening illness. Located in a rural setting near Ringa Town in Homa Bay County, Rehema’s mission is to provide hospice and palliative care to the local community and the region. It is the only hospice in a five county area, home to over 5 million people. Rehema is being built, literally brick by brick as funding allows.
Rehema was founded in January 2022 with the purchase of land and drilling for water. In October 2023, she opened her doors of mercy for the first time, providing outpatient services in the clinic as well as home-based care. A few months later in March 2024, Rehema welcomed her first inpatient hospice guests. Today, Rehema serves men, women, and children, relieving acute, chronic, and life-threatening diseases. She now has 26 beds, and hopes soon to finish a children’s ward and surgery center, possibly by early 2026. This Two story project was started in April of 2025, and now has its walls and soon its roof up. We await new funding to complete this so desperately needed addition to our facility.
Rehema works closely with the local Ministry of Health and community by supporting community health promoters (CHPs), front line health workers, who provide basic health care in their communities. CHPs are, at many times, a first contact for people needing healthcare, often reaching out to Rehema for follow up care for their clients.
Rehema’s staff are trained in hospice and palliative care providing the best possible compassionate care to those who walk through her doors. Recently, our nurses have begun regularly treating patients in their homes, monitoring health, providing medications and wound care, and training families and caregivers how best to care for their loved ones.
Caring for body and soul also means providing spiritual care. Inpatients and home care patients are cared for by staff member Deaconess Elizabeth who regularly does devotions with patients, prays with them and listens to their needs. She provides spiritual and social counsel to patients and works as their advocate with the medical staff, pastoral caregivers, and with patient family members. She often accompanies the medical staff in home visits and is a great advocate for Rehema in her community. Her mission is to bring the comfort of Christ, the Word of God, to hurting hearts and worried minds, relieving loneliness, bringing dignity and regard to patients who are often isolated from their families and communities because of the distances friends and family have to travel to get to Rehema.
Rehema’s goal is to relieve suffering through palliative care and end-of-life care, called hospice, bringing patients dignity and hope, being the face of Christ for His hurting brothers and sisters.
Palliative care is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families who are facing problems associated with life-threatening illness through early identification, correct assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, whether physical, psychosocial and spiritual.”
Rehema Hospice and Clinic is a place of mercy.
A place the suffering and dying can call home.
A place where sufferers are not shunned but understood and embraced.
A place where mercy comes as a healing balm of body and soul.
A place where joy is not a second language but our mother tongue.