Friday, February 17, 2017

Looking to the Future

This year we have had some changes to our staff that make us think more about the future for medical staff.  We lost one of our doctors at the end of the year, Dra. Sara Castellanos.  She was a great part of our team and we miss her a lot.

As we started looking for a replacement, we quickly realized that there are few local Christian doctors available to work in this ministry for more than about a year. While Health Talents currently scholarships 3 students in medical school, it will be four years before they are available to work for us.
Medical School Student - Ana Marta

Medical School Student - Josue - second from right.

Medical Student - Jose - leaning in on the left of the photo.

So, we are setting out in a new direction--nurse practitioner training.  We have hired a professional nurse (university trained) who is from one of the local churches and speaks Kiche and Spanish.

Meet Ana Patricia, RN

She worked at the local health department seeing family planning patients and malnourished kids.  So she had a good start.

We are designing a program of didactic study (book work) and clinical practice.  We are blessed to be living in the internet era, where lots of material can be found online and in Spanish.  But this still takes time to plan and energy to teach, so we would appreciate your prayers for wisdom and knowledge for all of us!  If this works out, we hope to begin training some of the scholarship nurses that will be graduating in the next couple of years to assist physicians in our growing clinics.