Eye Surgery Mission - 2016

Congratulations and thank you to everyone involved in making PazSalud's 2016 Eye Surgery Mission such a huge success!  We had another great volunteer team this year that enabled us to perform our most  procedures ever during a surgery mission.  In total, we were able to perform 61 surgeries on 56 patients and we may be providing surgery to some additional patients that we weren't able to help during the mission week.

Thank you to all our donors as well whose generous gifts allow us to ensure that our very needy patients receive the resources and care required for successful outcomes at no cost to them.  Your help is invaluable and we couldn't do our work without you.

Dr. Jule performing a cataract surgery

One of our many happy patients

Eye Surgery Patient Meeting

We just finished up our second patient meeting for PazSalud's upcoming Eye Surgery Mission on May 14 and all our patients are ready to go!  We have a full roster of people selected from our General Medical Mission in Comasagua in February who will have either cataract or pterygium surgery so we're bringing down a full team of ophthalmologists, optometrists and support personnel to operate on roughly 65 patients in a nearby hospital in Santa Tecla.

Given the nature of this mission and seriousness of surgery in general, PazSalud holds two patient information meetings where we talk to them in depth about the surgery itself, what it entails before, during and after, and the logistics of their participation.  The meetings are a great way for them to ask questions about the process and decide whether or not they want to have surgery with us.  In addition, they allow us to gauge the patient's interest which enables us to better prepare our team with adequate supplies and proper scheduling.

Kathy Garcia (Director of PazSalud), Delmy (the local CIS coordinator), Rosy and Rosa (PazSalud volunteers and friends) and I helped organize and conduct the meeting held in the community center of Comasagua.

Kathy Garcia and Rosa registering patients for the meeting

Rosy talking to the patients about surgery

General Medical Mission - 2016 Comasagua

A huge 'thank you' to everyone who made the 2016 General Medical Mission in Comasagua so successful!  From the amazing institutional support of PeaceHealth to our dedicated and incredible U.S. and local volunteers, thank you, we couldn't do it without a complete team effort. 

We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to serve the beautiful people of this needy Salvadoran community and we ended the week with impressive numbers:

Total patients – 1,477

Total consults – 1,886

   General medicine - 889

   Pediatrics – 269

   Women's clinic – 114

   Optometry – 614

Patients signed up for eye surgery – 78

Water filter referrals – 76

Medical referrals and special cases – 107

Special order glasses – 18

In addition to the numbers, we met some wonderful people in a gorgeous mountain setting, made some life-long friends, impacted people's lives, challenged ourselves in unique ways and had an unforgettable experience serving a population desperately in need of quality, caring medical attention.

*thanks to Wayne Ause for the great pictures.

Visit to San Rafael Hospital

It's never too early to start planning the 2015 missions so our local coordinator, Maira Romero, long-time PazSalud friend and nurse, Rosy Melara, and I went to visit San Rafael Hospital in Santa Tecla in August to talk to with them about the eye surgery mission we would like them to host in May.

We met with the new hospital director, Dr. Yeerles Luis Angel Ramírez, to introduce ourselves and PazSalud and talk about how we could work together in 2015 to provide cataract and pterygium surgeries to the patients of Tamanique (the location of our 2015 General Mission in February).

Then on Kathy Garcia’s recent trip to El Salvador took the opportunity to tour the facilities in greater detail and begin mapping out our patient flow and personnel location.  Rosy, a long-time San Rafael Hospital employee, joined us to introduce us to her former coworkers.  This will be PazSalud’s fifth time working in San Rafael Hospital so at this point it feels like a second home.

Maira, Dr. Yeerles, Rosy

Operating room in San Rafael

Rosy and Kathy touring the operating area