Story of Outreach Team

Every day on the Outreach Team is different and often an adventure. Over decades in medicine, I’ve always enjoyed working in a small hospital as a nurse, because you work all over the hospital, in all departments. You always learned something new! This is similar to the Outreach Team for Lao Friends Hospital for Children, as the team coordinates care throughout the hospital and follows up with children who live all over Luang Prabang Province. 

 

Every day is different with different challenges. Our primary role is to do follow up care to check on the young patients after they leave the hospital. Some villages where the children go home to are as far as six hours drive away, including many hours of severely rutted, dirt roads. One child’s village requires going one and a half hours on a very noisy, bumpy tractor with nauseating petrol fumes. 

 

 

Every day the team reviews each existing and new patient, in every department of the hospital, determining who needs follow up, when, where and how often? The team diligently reviews each child’s diagnosis, physical condition, medication, family situation, nutrition and cooking needs, sanitary circumstances and water supply, home environment including electricity, neighbors, space for planting, schooling, finances, cultural and health beliefs, and also transportation needs, distance to and time needed to get to the hospital, and local district health centers. 

 

Then the team determines a plan of care, determined by need and location. The mission of Friends Without A Border is to provide free, high quality, compassionate health care to all children.

 

Some patients are followed over years and some might only need a few visits, depending on their medical and social needs. A nurse always goes on each visit, and a social worker, counselor, nutritionist, physical / occupational and child life therapist often go, as indicated. Our driver also plays an important role getting the team to the right place safely, sometimes also transporting patients to or from the hospital. Finding homes by word of mouth, and without maps, can be a puzzle. Fortunately villagers also know who lives where and can direct us, when needed. 

 

 

It’s hard for people in the western world, who have maintained highways, cars, public transportation, clean water, toilets, and electricity, to consider what it must be like for a mother to carry her grown child with a developmental disability straight up the same hill where she has to carry heavy jugs of water each day. There are everyday challenges for people in the remote villages, who also take on medical challenges to care for sick and disabled children.

 

It is hard for people who live protected by immunized communities to imagine their child dying of diphtheria, tetanus or the effects mumps or chickenpox can have on pregnant mothers and their unborn children. It’s hard, in a western world, to imagine that a child who needs a blood transfusion might not be able to get blood, (and certainly not plasma which reduces the problems of overloading their body with iron,) or chemotherapy, or a simple heart operation. We can easily take so much for granted. 

 

When my first child was born 10 weeks prematurely, 42 years ago, I was so grateful the technology and expertise existed in a small city in California to close his heart defect and help him grow up to now be a 183 cm healthy adult! Next to him was a little baby with their stomach contents outside of their abdomen, a condition called gastroschisis. Before LFHC started, children in the region with these conditions would have died. Now they can live, like my child and the child next to him, because of the health care provided to all Lao children in the area. 

 

It has been a privilege to work with the compassionate, caring Outreach Team, mentored and led by the “boots on the ground” 24 years of lived experience of “Kazu,” Kazumi Akao. And I would like to send  you all a message of support for the crowdfunding for the outreach program!

 

 

Babette Munting, Specialist(Volunteer)