Thame Health Clinic
Project details
The Himalayan Trust runs a health clinic in Thame, a Khumbu village a six-hour walk from Khunde Hospital, alongside a sister clinic in Phortse. Local health workers staff it day to day, with Khunde's doctors backing them up through case discussions, supply runs and video consultations, and the two clinics between them treated around 1,400 patients last year. It matters most for Thame's elderly residents, who cannot easily make the walk to Khunde themselves.
On 16 August 2024, a glacial lake outburst flood tore through Thame, sweeping away the clinic building along with homes, lodges and the village school. Health services moved into a tent, then a community building, while a new clinic, with an outpatient room, a waiting room and staff quarters, is being rebuilt on safer ground for completion by the end of 2026. Dr Kami Temba Sherpa, Khunde Hospital's doctor-in-charge, grew up in a village below Thame and started school there as a boy.
Thame's health clinic dates to 1979. It is one of two outreach clinics, alongside Phortse's, run for villages too remote to visit Khunde Hospital easily. Khunde itself is a six-hour walk from Thame, so the clinic exists chiefly for people, especially the elderly, who cannot make that trip.
That role became urgent on 16 August 2024, when a glacial lake outburst flood swept down the Thame valley. It destroyed homes, lodges, the school and the health clinic, and also knocked out the region's hydropower supply. Around 300 people live in Thame village itself and roughly 1,000 across the wider valley. No one died, because the flood struck during the day, but the clinic and much else people depended on was simply gone.
A temporary clinic went up first in a tent, then in a sturdier community building at nearby Thameteng. Planning for a permanent replacement began within months: a Himalayan Trust Nepal technical estimate from February 2025 put the rebuild at just over NPR 18 million, split 50/50 between Himalayan Trust Nepal and the Nepal Green Tara Foundation, on a safer site than the flood-scoured original. A further flood in August 2025 claimed five more homes and left the village's long-term stability uncertain. By September 2026, construction was under way and due to finish before the end of the year.
The clinic's most direct link to Thame is Dr Kami Temba Sherpa, Khunde Hospital's doctor-in-charge since 2002. Born in the small village of Mende, just below Thame, he started school in Thame aged six, in the very school Sir Edmund Hillary had built there, before walking five hours a day to Khumjung School and eventually training as Khunde's first fully Nepali doctor. The clinic rebuild proposal names him as the doctor who will keep making monthly visits to Thame once the new building is finished, particularly for the village's elderly.