Improve Health for Mothers & Children in Pakistan

Dear Friends;

Last year, because of donors like you, almost 60,000 patients in Sindh received essential health care. This is twice as many as were served in the preceding year illustrating the continued need for our charitable service in underprivileged areas. Most of the individuals and families who come to our primary care clinics in Gharo and Baldia Town or the Pediatric wards in Shikarpur face multiple financial and social hardships in addition to common health ailments like malnutrition anemia, diarrhea, dehydration, respiratory conditions and hypertension.

Your donation helps fund reliable high quality lifesaving medical care such as treatment of severe dehydration from diarrhea, breathing treatments for asthma attacks, and critical medicines such as antibiotics for infections and treatment for controlling high blood pressure.

Patients like Ibrahim, a young boy of 7, are referred out to secondary or tertiary care centres when needed. Ibrahim recently came to our Gharo facility with high fever, vomiting, and symptoms of pneumonia. He had been to another general practitioner in the area with no relief. His younger brother had died of similar symptoms last year. When he came to us, he was severely dehydrated and needed to be hospitalized for treatment with fluids and antibiotics. Since we do not have overnight services, we transported Ibrahim to a local government hospital after initial management and provided the medicines he needed while in hospital. He returned to us for follow-up care once he was discharged 3 days later and now is fully recovered.

In January, SHINE’s advisor, Dr. Naghmana Shafi, returned to Karachi to train new groups and monitor the progress of our “Helping Babies Breathe” neonatal resuscitation training program.This is an educational initiative of the American Academy of Pediatrics, aimed at saving newborn lives during the “Golden Minute,” through simple neonatal resuscitation techniques in resource limited settings.

Dr. Naghmana Shafi has conducted a number of workshops in Karachi at the Dow University of Health Sciences/Civil Hospital, Jinnah Sindh Medical University, APPNA Institute of Public Health, National Institute of Child Health-Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, Sobhraj Maternity Home, Indus Hospital, Murshid Hospital and Memon Hospital. To date, she has trained 450 doctors, medical students, midwives, midwifery students, nurses, nursing students, paramedics, lady health visitors and 200 master trainers who will continue to train others in this field. Workshops were conducted both in the local language, Urdu, as well as English. She has also donated Training Kits to all these institutions.

We are deeply grateful  for your support in our achiements and look forward to your continued support in the future.

Links:

• Search for SHINE Humanity on google.com