Ethiopia Bound

Harrisburg pediatric surgeon Domingo Alvear, MD, and a team of Pennsylvania physicians recently visited Ethiopia with the World Surgical Foundation to provide much needed health care and teach valuable skills to local health care workers. 

Learn about their mid-February journey and daily achievements through the eyes of blogger Jeff Bucs as they helped patients, physicians, and other health care workers in this impoverished country. You also can watch two videos of the trip on YouTube:
Later in the year, the World Surgical Foundation will venture to South America twice to provide similar assistance.

Dr. Alvear founded the World Surgical Foundation, based in Harrisburg, in 1997 to help physicians in impoverished and developing countries acquire skills, medical equipment, and supplies while providing aid and comfort to patients in those countries.

He was inspired to start the foundation after travelling with his wife Veneranda, an anesthesiologist, on medical missions to their native Philippines. They knew that when they left, so would the surgical care they provided.

“In many countries, there’s an endless need for ongoing, quality medical care. So we go to teach as well as treat,” said Dr. Alvear.

The World Surgical Foundation sponsors yearly surgical missions all over the world, and in the past travelled to Thailand (before and after the tsunami), the Philippines, India, and Honduras. The volunteer physicians, including residents, typically complete 25 to 40 surgeries a day during a 10-day mission, sharing their skills with local doctors and nurses.

“My main goal now is to teach and support physicians and nurses in other countries and to help them get the training they need. We’ve brought nurses here from Honduras to spend a week at the neonatal intensive care unit so that they can go back and share what they’ve learned,” Dr. Alvear said.
 
“My work in other countries makes me more compassionate and more innovative. You learn to do more with less, and in the simplest way possible,” he added.

Clinics in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya, and Russia—as well as the Community Check-up Center and Hamilton Health Center in Central Pennsylvania—benefit from the World Surgical Foundation’s donations of everything from anesthesia machines, operating tables, and wheelchairs to scales, sutures, and tongue depressors.

A recent grant helped renovate a hospital in Honduras—and now the staff can wash their hands.

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Last Updated: 6/30/2009
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