Barefoot Doctors

The First week of the Barefoot Doctors final year of training has been completed. We thank CHE and the excellent training the students received. A special thank you to David Crist and Chhuanna who “facilitated” the training. In a survey we took on Friday afternoon almost all the class said they would change some things in their community projects from last year now that they have had the beginning CHE training. That tells us it was a worthwhile experience for all of them. They learned some important techniques on how to prepare for entering a new relationship with a village and how to prepare for community projects.

For example, one technique is to write a calendar for that village. This would include what the weather is like month to month in that area, what is happening with the rice crop and agriculture each month, any festivals, patterns in illness like malaria, or anything else related to times of the year. Dr. Nilson and I also learned from this exercise and it helped us better understand the circumstances the students face. For instance, when written on a calendar it is clear to see you do not want to travel during the rainy season because the roads get bad or even impassable, the mosquitoes get worse and the instance of malaria goes way up! In some of those areas if a road gets washed out they may not be able to get supplies in or out for weeks or months! That means if you are in the village you have to stay in that area and they may not be able to get food or medicine in. There is no assistance from their government so they just have to deal with it.

We also collected all their patient logbooks and are in the process of sifting through the data. It is extremely interesting and we hope to share some of our findings next week. More than half of them saw more than a 100 patients in the last year alone! And this is before they are graduates of the program. Imagine how much more effective they will be in years to come. Most of them also worked on community development or education projects, as well, to make a real and lasting positive change in the villages. Not bad for all volunteer health care workers! I know many of you are like me and love to see statistics so we will post them when we get the data cleaned up a bit.

Today is Saturday here and Dr. Nilson and I are busy catching up on computer work, organizational issues, and going through the recently collected log book data from the students. The log book information will help us fine-tune the program to their real life needs based on their actual experiences over the last year. Through this we know how many patients they saw, what age ranges, sex, and what diagnosis they gave them. We also know what medication and how often they used it. This will help us teach and prepare them for their specific needs and help us be better prepared for future classes.

Sawadee Krap (Thai salutation)

Rick Astone