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Pay it Forward- Napoleon Franco Pareja La Casa del Nino Children’s Hospital

Napoleon Franco Pareja La Casa del Nino Children’s Hospital

Fri Apr 10 2015By Medical Dealer Magazine

Pay it Forward- Napoleon Franco Pareja La Casa del Nino Children’s Hospital

It was on a 2007 vacation to the tropical South American fishing village of Cartagena, Colombia, that Linda Reesor first visited Napoleon Franco Pareja La Casa del Nino Children’s Hospital. Reesor, the director of nursing education at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, had taken a much-needed vacation. Encouraged to check out the local pediatric health center while she was there, Reesor came face to face with the disparity between its condition and the facility where she works.

Touched by the conditions there, Reesor returned home determined to compile the materials, manpower, and strategy to embark on a medical mission to Cartagena. She enlisted the aid of coworker Luis Molina, pediatric endoscopy nurse and nursing committee co-chair at DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, and the two rallied eight other volunteers to join their cause. They paid for the journey entirely out of pocket, supported by donations raised from bake sales, raffles, and other small-scale fundraisers, and packed their bags with as much relief aid as they could carry.

Molina, a native of Medellin, Colombia, had visited Cartagena in his childhood, but the feeling of being able to return, armed with the skills and resources to aid its population, was something else altogether.

“I like to help people in general and I like to go on missions,” he said. “But now that I am going to my own country, I feel indescribable. I want to go every year.”

Molina described Cartagena as “like a little Miami. Situated in the northern coastal region of the country by the shores of the Caribbean, it’s an old, Spanish colonial town surrounded by a big stone wall, much like San Juan, Puerto Rico.”

Cartagena is also a modern city, “with big, very safe, very good hotels, and beautiful beaches and islands nearby,” he added.

The one-story pediatric hospital building is “beautiful and bigger” than the original infrastructure, he said, which was a tiny mission established by Catholic nuns in the 1940s. Eventually it will house an emergency room, Intensive Care Unit (ICU), consultation room, and cardiovascular surgery unit with the technology, staff and logistics necessary to address congenital heart disorders, as cardiac malformations “are very common in that population,” Molina said. Someday, he said, the hospital envisions adding on a pair of eight-story towers in which to provide pediatric subspecialty care.

As small as it is, the 150-bed hospital has local university affiliations and draws patients from throughout the region. Molina said it is “considered a teaching hospital,” offering clinical training to nurses and medical students, and also receiving occasional international medical student volunteers. On average, the hospital receives about 100,000 emergency patients annually, and admits about 10 percent of those. Approximately 50,000 outpatient consultations and 1,000 surgeries are performed.

“It’s in a poor neighborhood, and they serve that population,” Molina said. “People go there without money and without insurance and they take care of them no matter what. They see patients from fetal or one month to 20 years, more or less. They treat everything — respiratory, cardiac, digestive ailments.”

While onsite, the visitors led staff education classes, a community health fair, and performed some consultations in a nearby neighborhood. They offered psychological, nutritional and other medical care. They did rounds to see some of the children who were receiving care there. Molina recalls meeting one nine-year-old boy who had been waiting until the visitors arrived for surgery to treat a brain tumor; that moment was especially moving for him.

“They have no supplies; no resources,” he said. “He was waiting for surgery that week. We went to see him when he came out. They were very happy that they could help him.”

 

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