Closing Ceremonies

Just a quick update on our NRT Training (see previous post).

This is the Closing Ceremonies for the second of two very successful training sessions held this week. This was also the larger of the two groups.

We've learned, now, that the training here carries a particular distinction. Though also held in many other nations, it usually only reaches a relatively small portion of the total population of doctors. Here in Mongolia, every Neonatal Specialist in the country attended this training, as far as we know. All of them. 100%

As a result, during his closing remarks, Dr. Preece suggested that if all of the NRT Specialists now do their part in training nurses and assistants, that there is the potential for Mongolia to move from a country troubled with infant mortality, to one of the safest of countries in which to have a baby. Quite a step up, wouldn't you say?

Each of the participants received a bag like the one pictured, full of training materials and medical equipment.

This is where at least some of your donation dollars have been used. Feels good, doesn't it.
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Is There a Doctor in the House?

We have had a lot of doctors in our office building this week. This was the week scheduled for NRT (Neo-Natal Resuscitation) training. NRT specialists from all over Mongolia were invited to participate in free training in the process of treating newborns who have difficulty immediately after birth.

Interestingly, all of the NRT doctors here are female, as are the majority of doctors. Medicine is socialized here and the pay is quite low. In fact, low paid teachers make more money here than doctors. It can be a difficult profession to survive in.

It seems that there has been significant difficulty here, with newborns not surviving the birth process. We reported here earlier that a number of doctors themselves sought counseling after losing a few newborns they felt they should have been able to save. That is easier to understand once we learned that those same doctors are all mothers, themselves.

They would perform autopsies on those infants and discover most of them had collapsed lungs - something fairly easily corrected in the States. But they have had neither the training nor the equipment to deal with those situations here.

So, the Church brought in Doctor Cornish (an Area Seventy) and Doctor Preece (that is Dr Preece teaching through a translator in the first photo - Dr./Elder Cornish is sitting with his back to the camera) to provide the needed training, and donated 500 small resuscitators for the locals to use. The NRT Specialists will now return to their hospitals and train others.

As we watched part of that training, it became apparent that one of the first things that needed to be done was to help them unlearn what they had been doing and then learn and practice newer techniques which have been proven to save many such newborns.

You can see the small resuscitators and the specially altered dolls used in the training, sitting on this table.

Comments could be heard along the lines of, ‘This is the best NRT training we have ever had.’ And we couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like for those same doctors when they use their new training and save their first newborn because of it.

How thankful we are to be able to witness the wonderful things that are happening here.

Side Note: Sister Caldwell and I had the added privilege to sit with Elder/Dr Cornish for dinner Monday night. What a treat that was! He shared some wonderful Gospel things with us and we felt very fortunate to have that opportunity.
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