volunteers

This post was written by Melanie Bhatta, RN, a nurse from the United States who is serving at our hospital for a year.    Malnutrition is a significant problem here in Nepal, especially in the rural villages.  Poverty and a lack of knowledge about a balanced diet compound each other to cause long-term health effects, which we see in some of our children at the hospital.  Children are not only not getting enough food to eat, but also the foods they do eat do not provide the proper nutrients that their growing bodies need. In response to this problem, our [...]

This blog post was written by Dr. Ajit Kuruvilla, an ob/gyn from Trinidad in the West Indies, who volunteered at our hospital for a few weeks this summer.  Dr. Ajit was a tremendous help to us here, providing compassionate clinical care as well as supporting the long-term physicians and staff at our hospital.     Arathi was a 21 year-old who came to HDCS-TEAM Hospital Dadeldhura in labor.  This was her first pregnancy and she had not had any prenatal care.  The midwife on duty suspected a breech presentation and requested an ultrasound scan which not only confirmed this, but [...]

This blog post was written by Erin, a medical student from the US who spent a few weeks with us this summer.  Erin grew up in Nepal as the daughter of medical missionaries.  Trainees who rotate with us have opportunities to learn about tropical diseases, gain procedural experience, and learn about health care delivery in the developing world.   I am so grateful to God for the time I got to spend at the Dadeldhura hospital this summer.  As a US medical student, I got to return to the country I grew up in and learned from lots of people [...]

Dr. Josh Campbell, an oral-maxillofacial surgeon from Tennessee, USA, volunteered at HDCS-TEAM Hospital in February 2011.   An article about his trip appeared in a supplement to the Knoxville News Sentinel.  Read the article here.

Dr. Jeremy was on call.  To call it a rough night would be an understatement.  In addition to a few relatively routine cases, a beloved elderly man who is the father of one of our staff passed away.  Two patients came in each with a pneumothorax (collapsed lung), a condition that requires the insertion of a chest tube.  And then a woman came in after having tried to push her baby out for over 24 hours with no success.  This was to prove the most difficult case of the night. We learned that this was this woman’s seventh pregnancy, but [...]