By Leila Hawken | Executive Assistant, Surgeons of Hope Foundation
A 19-member surgical/medical team from Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York has returned from an SoH sponsored week-long mission trip to La Mascota Children's Hospital in Managua, the site of SoH's new Pediatric Heart Center of Nicaragua. Reports are in from the doctors who treated the nine waiting infants and children. During the week, one of the little infants expired from being too weak to recover from the complex surgery, underscoring the urgency of opening the new Heart Center and the planned satellite clinics which will speed the care to the population.
The new Heart Center is completed now, and the next three phases will see the equipment and furnishings being installed. Phase One will open one operating room and two ICU beds in June of this year (2013), and we will be sponsoring a mission from NY Presbyterian Hospital to visit for the week and celebrate the opening with a week of surgeries and on-going training of the local staff.
Two full containers of purchased and donated medical equipment and supplies are being shipped this month (March) to arrive in time for the opening. One container will go from Denver (Project CURE) and the other from New York. The containers include hospital beds, ICU beds, monitors, surgical insruments appropriately sized for infants and children, perfusion equipment, echocardiography equipment, and more. Also being shipped is a Smartboard unit, a gift from Ronald McDonald House Charities, to be put to great use in training and telemedicine programs we are initiating as part of our program. Needless to say, the local hospital staff are excited to be seeing their new Pediatric Heart Center take shape.
Thanks to our Global Giving donors our program is proceeding apace. Much needs to be done in preparation for the opening. We continue to need the help of our family of Global Giving Donors. Why not distribute this report to family and friends who might be willing to join with you in supporting Surgeons of Hope? Small donations add up.
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