I will be working alongside surgeons and physicians from across the US in Kinondo Kwetu Hospital in Diani, Kenya for a medical and surgical mission to provide life saving surgeries in the fields of General, OBGYN and ENT surgeries. I will assist in pre-screening patients and monitoring them post-operatively as well as serving as an OR circulator and surgical technician. I will also provide teaching for local staff, residents and medical students in various infectious disease topics including Infection Prevention and Control in Clinical Settings, Surviving Sepsis protocols and Emerging Multidrug Resistant Pathogens.
It will be my first time visiting Kenya, so I also hope to learn from Kenyan health care providers about local traditional medicines and practices.
We will be serving a population in and around the Diani region as well as those patients that will travel from far away cities to receive free surgeries such as hernia repairs, cholecystectomies, hysterectomies and thyroidectomies that they may not be able to afford otherwise, nor have the technical expertise in their communities to receive them. Some of these patients have been waiting for several months to years for surgeries that our team will provide.
We hope to perform as many surgeries as safely possible in our time there while building local capacity to train physicians and surgeons as we go. We hope that the national doctors will be able to assume some of the skills that will be taught so that they may continue to provide care or Kenyans after we have left. We will also leave supplies, equipment and training materials that can be used for future surgeries and medical care for the communities the hospital services.
Kinondo Kwetu Hospital is located in Mwabungu near Diani Beach, Kenya. Established originally in 2008 as a basic medical clinic by the Kinondo Kwetu Trust Fund, it has expanded into a full-scale private hospital with surgical services, maternal and child care as well as specialty clinics. Our project served to provide specialized surgical care to patients in the region with goiters requiring surgical resection via partial or total thyroidectomy. Our team also assisted in specialty care clinic providing guidance and teaching for primary care and infectious disease clinics helping local physicians diagnose and treat a myriad of outpatient clinic conditions. The entire mission was a rewarding and heartfelt collaboration between Global Healing Hands and Surgical Aid for Kenya, where a group of specialized physicians trained and assisted local hospital staff in providing the best care possible to the local community.
