The Local Investment

The long term plan for this project is for a self sufficient relation service at Adventist Hospital Santiago City (AHSC). What does that mean? Regular surgery being completed year round, with or without a team of Aussies on site.

There are many pieces to that puzzle that need to be out together. With only three surgical visits in place, we are still refining the processes of high volume surgery. Supply choices and levels, costs, and patient selection all time to get right. This visit has certainly improved on previous trips, and they might still be baby steps but we are getting better.

One such improvement needed is the work of patient screening and assessment, and a need to widen the reach of search. AHSC has an amazing network of outreach teams, volunteers from AHSC that donated their time and travel into remote communities for simple education and health interventions. Its quite a lot like us at OHI!

Yesterday we organised a session with some of their key volunteers and taught them the basics of searching for cataracts, testing vision, and collecting the necessary information. Moving forward this mobile team will always search for patients wherever they go, increasing the number of identified patients.

Elizabeth, one of our theatre nurses is a Nurse Educator back home in Australia. She absolutely loves to teach. Today with Liz’s help, Ivy who is one of the Filipino theatre team stepped in as the theatre scrub nurse for the first time. It was great to see such practical teaching and quick learning!

Empowerment is a big part of what OHI does. It helps us make our projects more effective, but also one puts us one more baby step closer to our goal.