Having the right tools at your disposal is critical, but knowing how to use them transforms the quality of healthcare that medical professionals can provide.

Twenty-two biomedical technicians, surgeons, midwives, nurses and laboratory technicians gathered around their instructor at Shinshicho Hospital for their first training session to learn about new equipment provided by a collaboration between WEEMA and the International Medical Equipment Collaborative (IMEC), a US-based nonprofit organization specializing in providing medical equipment to advance standard of care in health facilities in low resource settings.

Over the course of ten days, this team of healthcare professionals will learn to assemble, maintain, and operate key equipment that will:

Enable safer C-sections and new major surgical services
Allow healthcare workers to complete in-house diagnostics instead of referring elsewhere
Fill gaps in neonatal intensive care (NICU) resources
Provide additional patient beds- although the hospitals had patient beds before, reportedly they were constantly moving between departments because of bed shortage

The medical devices, paired with knowledge of how to operate them, will save lives of women needing emergency C-sections, newborns requiring resuscitation and/or intensive care, patients in need of a laboratory diagnosis like diabetes or HIV/AIDs, and individuals needing minor and major surgery who will no longer have to travel far from home, up to 50 kilometers, throughout the KT Zone.

Providing medical equipment and subsequent training is just one of the ways WEEMA is strengthening the healthcare system in the KT Zone!

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