XX Winter Symposium on Emergency Medicine and Intensive Care Karpacz 1-5.03.2011
22 March 20116th Open Silesian Championships in Medical Rescue JURA 2011
17 May 2011
A mission to Paraguay, the first ever in the history of this city, has set off from Jastrzębie-Zdrój. Its organizer is the chaplain of the Regional Specialized Hospital No. 2, Rev. Wojciech Grzesiak.
Without much persuasion, he completed a group of willing doctors consisting of:
– Grazyna Adamek, an internal medicine doctor
– Jagoda Kurpuś, a dentist
– Iwona Ptasinski, a pediatrician
– Tomasz Pohaba, an anesthesiologist.
They were joined as volunteers by Bartlomiej Fojcik, a student of the Ursuline School, whose task on site will be to teach English.
The entire team left in late February for a month to Quarambare to treat the local population.
Medical care in Paraguay leaves much to be desired.
Hospitals are few and poorly equipped. There is still a shortage of hospitals, especially in rural areas. Health services in Paraguay are concentrated in the country’s urban areas. The south of the country suffers from high infant mortality, where the rate is 23 per 1,000 births. The adult mortality rate is 4.7 per 1,000 people. The main causes are heart disease, intestinal disease, cancer, and pneumonia. Health care efforts are hampered by poor access to uncontaminated drinking water. Approx. 20% of the population lacks access to drinking water, 5% lacks access to adequate sanitation, 25% of the country’s children suffer from malnutrition.
There are huge deficits in medical and nursing care. For example, the hospital has one pediatrician who has to admit 200-300 children a day. There is a 40% shortage of pediatricians. There is also a deficit of hospital places for children, which reaches 50%, and for adults, which reaches 67%.Immunizations are performed late or not at all. They would have prevented 7,000 cases of, for example, whooping cough, which is the cause of death for some 3,000 children, and many complications.
Akatex supported the participants of the Paraguay Mission by offering rescue clothing, and at the same time the expedition itself became a good way to test our clothing in extreme conditions.
