Training the community about Rheumatic Heart disease

By

  This year we have been blessed by a grant that allows us to increase our number of screening opportunities and help to cover training for local government officials and staff. We have realized that as a hospital based program there is a lot we can do, but with the community involved we can expand our reach and deepen our impact.

This last week felt like a culmination of this in many ways! We had 80 people attend our training/working group as we thought of ways to attack the problem of rheumatic heart disease from primary prevention and secondary prevention. We discussed the results from screening over 21,000 Ethiopian school children!

There is an Ethiopian proverb that goes like this: 
When the spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion!

The morning of the event God reminded me of Psalm 126:6-7

Those who sow with tears
    will reap with songs of joy. 

  Those who go out weeping,
    carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
    carrying sheaves with them.

 I remember the name, the face, and the feeling of watching my first child die of rheumatic heart disease when I first arrived. I remember the family's response. I remember feeling the injustice of this disease taking the lives of young children and adults to a disease predisposed to the poor, especially women. 
As I thought about this, tears of sorrow streamed down my face. The sorrow and grief and are still here and maybe even amplified after watching many children die of this disease for almost 10 years. It has been a long road to get this far. And still in our program we have found two children with such severe RHD that they died shortly after we found them during one of our outreaches. 

And yet, we have hope that the seeds we have sowed with weeping, will return with songs of joy! 
We took a big step forward last week.
 
 
                                            Our RHD team
                                            Our CEO and leader, Ephrem Gebresilassie
                                            Dr Lealem, our internal medicine consultant
                                            Dr Michelle
                                            The training day/work group attendees

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Memorial

By
 Memorial. The name given to this child. She was born at 33 weeks via c-section. Her mother came to the hospital very sick with breathing difficulty. The mother was taken to the OR for cesarean delivery with the hope that the delivery of the baby would help with her breathing... but it didn't help much.  One day after surgery, we found her breast mass, and found that her breathing problems were likely metastatic breast cancer. She was 33 years old. She has a husband and two other daughters ages 5 and 3. This was an emotional time for all of us, especially the family. Through the act of grace and the help of many, we were able to bring the new son, Memorial, to see his mother from the NICU to the ICU on CPAP. He was able to be held by her. We were able to get a picture for the family of this sweet family. Later that night, the nurses told me that the mother said, "that was the best gift she had had in her life. She could die in peace now."  That afternoon, I found out that...
Read more

Christian Academy of African Physicians (CAAP)

By
Image
  "Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty.” Zechariah 4:6  In March of this year, we invited a consultant team from the christian academy of African physicians to come to Soddo Christian Hospital to perform a feasibility study on starting a family medicine residency. You can read more about the organization here (https://www.caaphome.org/).   We toured all over Ethiopia meeting with representatives from the two other premier family medicine residency programs in Addis Ababa at Addis Ababa University and at St Pauls Millenium Medical College. We met with the federal ministry of health, and representatives from several other possible affiliate hospitals for this program.  We learned from the MOH's National specialty roadmap that in the next 10 years Ethiopia wants to deploy over 5,000 family medicine physicians to their primary hospitals to be the consultant to the primary care physician. Most primary care hospitals currently do not h...
Read more

Keeping things running in the OR

By
Image
 This year Adam received in invitation to be a speaker at The 42nd Annual Continuing Medical and Dental Education Conference . He was invited to join American surgeons from around the world working cross culturally to talk to them about how to keep things running in the OR! Adam has faithfully served behind the scenes in our hospital for almost 10 years to keep many of the hospital's facilities and equipment working. He was a great fit to give this presentation. He discussed the importance of team, building a biomedical department at your hospital and practical tips and tricks to keep equipment working and maintained in the hospital and operating room.  After many years of working quietly behind the scenes to see him be able to share with many the things he has learned through his work at Soddo Christian Hospital.
Read more