Medical Team - Monday

So here's a look at each of our wonderful teams.

Our Medical team consists of 3 doctors, 1 student doctor, 1 pharmacist, 7 nurses, 13 "assistants".. and 6 "crowd control". The entire team had collected about 3 storage bins full of medicine, suture kits and fluoride treatments. But we were still quite low in a lot of medicines we really needed due to the natural disasters in Haiti and Chile. And going into it we knew we would really need a dentist for extractions.

On Monday we would be working side by side with 26 volunteer doctors, nurses, dentists and pharmacists from Trieu An hospital in Saigon. And we would need everyone as we approached the "clinic" we had set up and there was already well over 400 waiting for us. Unfortunately the patients were there way before we had any time to really set things up and then...chaos! It was a somewhat organized chaos but craaaazzzyyy most of the time!

Each table had a doctor or nurse and translator completing the medical history forms. Ideally it would have bee nice to have some breathing space but instead our patients who lived in the community were definitely anxious to be seen by someone, anyone who could help them; so each table had 10-15 people around it. Our doctors worked hard to diagnose the ailments and prescribe medicine and most important to see as many of the children as possible. Our non-nurse volunteers worked the hearing, vision, height, weight stations. And then some of them worked along side the dentists and hygienists to apply fluoride varnish on hundreds of little mouths. Our goal also was to get approximately 100 of "our community" (those that are living and working in the garbage dump and are active participants in Catalyst Foundation's community development projects) hep B tests and vaccinated.

After all was said and done, we saw 755 patients on the first day!