Patient Referral Program
Our referral program is for patients that need consultation with a specialist or surgery that we are unable to provide in Gandou. We have been working with a team from Louisiana that visits nearby (1 ½ hour truck ride) Lavallee three times a year. They provide general surgery, cataract surgery, ultrasounds, and OB/GYN consultations. Sending patient’s to their clinics has been going very well. It is the closest location, the easiest for Father and the health care workers to deal with, and costs very little. We will continue to send as many patients to them as they are able to accept.
We have also been working with the organization called CCH in Jacmel. Between last trip and this trip they accepted many of our referral cases.
When we sat down with the nurse and health care workers and went through these cases one by one we found that several of them had received surgery or other medical care. Some were scheduled for surgery in the future. Some patients however decided not to go to the CCH clinic. We think there may have many reasons for this, but one of the reasons likely has to do with the fact that it is such a huge undertaking for these patients to get down the mountain to actually go to the CCH clinic. Some of these patients have problems like huge hernias where the thought of traveling down the rough mountain on a motorcycle for hours sounds worse than just living with their current level of pain. We feel we need to improve our means of transportation in order to be able to help these people. We spent our Sunday afternoon going through the 350 page referral binder with the health care workers. They showed us which patients they completed, gave us the results of the work they had done on the patients, and provided us with receipts for all the work they had done on each patient.
The summary of what was completed is below:
- Oscal-15 referral patients accomplished.
- Josue – 11 referral patient completed.
- Ricgo-6 patients completed.
- Xavier-5 referral patients completed.
We are very happy with all our health care workers. It is clear they are doing all they can for us. Each trip we go back we have these detailed meetings with them and it is clear they are doing everything they can to help us get lots of referral patients done. We pray to God that we can figure out more ways to help these people because our patient referral list grows every trip. We have patients that have been waiting years for care. We pray we can listen to the ways that God is asking us to help these people.