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Guyana Watch opens 17th mission
Guyana Watch has brought its 17th batch of medical professionals to Guyana and will today begin countrywide outreaches designed to meet the needs of Guyanese patients.
The 2009 Guyana Watch team at the Princess Buddy
Guyana Watch is a team of local and overseas-based Guyanese, who, over the years has managed to attract specialist medical professionals to come to Guyana at their own will to provide free medical care. This year 10 doctors have come to Guyana.
President of Guyana Watch, Tony Yassin, last evening welcomed the new batch of professionals and announced that this year the team will focus on helping more children to go overseas for heart surgery. As a result of last year’s exercise, six children benefitted from heart surgery.
Along with the team this year is a cardiologist who has walked with a mobile echocardiogram machine, so that he can diagnose patients with heart complications on site so that they don’t have to travel to a particular site to be examined.
Over the years, Guyana Watch has been able to send some 40 Guyanese children for heart surgery in Trinidad and Tobago, India and the United States of America, with the recent emphasis being on the latter.
Yassin said that over the years Guyana Watch has sought to expand its reach in other areas of need, such as education. As a result, a number of scholarships have been awarded, and on this year’s mission, he said that the group plans to open between 15 and 20 computer laboratories in schools across the country.
The first medical mission begins at the Wales today, and is expected to attract hundreds from West Bank Demerara. Every year at each of the sites, Yassin said the group sees between 600 and 800 patients. Clinics are also planned for Meten-meer-zorg, West Coast Demerara; Timehri, East Bank Demerara; Santa Mission; Kuru Kuru; the Essequibo Coast and at Port Mourant and Bath Settlement in Berbice.
This year, as in the past, Yassin said the team of doctors will not concentrate on one particular illness, but will endeavour to cover all areas of medical illnesses in Guyana.
President of Guyana Watch, Tony Yassin
On the personal front, Yassin said for him, Guyana Watch is very fulfilling.
“When you see their wants, their needs and their illnesses and can help in some small way and provide some guidance, it is very fulfilling,” Yassin said last evening when he welcomed this year’s team at the Princess Buddy’s International Hotel, East Bank Demerara.
Five of the doctors on this mission have been here before. One of those is Dr Craig Mochson, an emergency medical physician who works in the Bronx in New York. This is his sixth visit to Guyana and said that his work here has a bigger impact than it does back home.
He said that the greater part of his work is spent here educating patients with diabetes and hypertension on how to manage their illnesses as he sees this area as severely lacking. He said that the Guyanese patients are mostly receptive to the information received and he spoke of e-mail and telephone calls he receives in the United States when he returns from those he had seen here.
Describing what he is able to accomplish here, Dr Mochson said that the volume of work he does in a day here is a month’s work when he practices in the Bronx.
Also returning to Guyana is emergency medical physician, Dr Ian DeSouza, who works with the immigrant population in Brooklyn, many of them being Guyanese, whose accent he is able to pick up easily. He said his visit to Guyana is also particularly geared towards education in advising patients how best to treat their illnesses and to follow the instructions given to them.
Dunisha Ranasuriya, a native of Sri Lanka and resident in Philadelphia is one of the cardiologists on the team. She also has visited Guyana and said she was happy to be back, and to be able to see some of the Guyanese children and be able to diagnose those who need heart surgery.
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