By Peter Rohloff | Medical Director
Dear Friends,
I am writing you again from Guatemala, where I have spent the last several days visiting our projects. This is just a short update, whose purpose is mostly to post a few pictures of our staff hard at work!
In most of the updates we have made to this project so far we have talked about the needs of the children we are serving and about the nutritional product, Plumpydoz, that we are using. However, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the hard work of our staff, whose compassion, commitment, and dedication make our programs a success.
Community based nutritional programs like ours require multiple levels of staff in order to run smoothly. At the most local level, we work with women's cooperatives, who coordinate most of the program logistics, such as distributing nutritional products and medications, measuring children's heights and weights, and noting down data in medical records. These women's groups are closely supported by our nursing staff, who help with triaging patients and who also lead educational sessions about nutrition and other health topics.
In the first picture, you can see Cristalina, one of our community leaders hard at work; she has just finished weighing and measuring children and she is recording their data for the medical team to review. In the second picture, you can see Herlinda, one of our nurses, together with Carolina, another community leader; they are just about to take off to make some house calls on some of our most malnourished children.
Finally, all children in our programs receive medical attention directly from our physician staff. This is done collaboratively with our nursing staff and with the community leaders, who always know the child's individual situation very well and provide expert advice on how to achieve our nutritional goals for each child. In the final picture, you can see our nurse Herlinda together with Dr. Cesar and myself carefully reviewing the growth of a particularly complicated case, trying to figure out how best to help the child out.
Thanks for listening!
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