Sign-up here for our upcoming Project Thailand Golf Tournament!

When: Saturday, January 30, 12:00 PM start

Where: Haile Plantation Golf and Country Club

Registration: click here

Would you like to be a sponsor? Learn more about how you can help. Sponsorship packages are listed here.

Project Thailand 2010

This past spring a group of doctors, nurses and medical students at the University of Florida traveled to Chiang Rai, Thailand to provide care to orphaned children of the Akha tribe. As students at the University of Florida College of Medicine, we are excited for the chance to return once more to provide medical care to the people of Chiang Rai. We expect this year’s trip to be bigger and better than last year’s as we will be increasing the number of students and faculty who will be making the trek.

This coming March, we will be providing health care to 400 orphaned children of Akha ethnicity. These Akha children are stateless refugees, as they are not recognized as Thai or Chinese citizens. Their only medical care comes from visiting groups. This year will be the fifth year UF physicians have made this volunteer trip, and the second time medical students will join the effort. We will set up clinic, where we will provide free basic medical care, including physicals, immunizations, vitamins, and medications. Last year we were able to create an electronic medical record for each of the children and we will be expanding upon this record during our upcoming trip.

We will also be setting up clinics in the surrounding villages of Chiang Rai and providing care for others within the community. This will require more supplies and organization but will provide us with the opportunity to expand our area of outreach.

Like the UF physicians, we medical students are providing our own funds to travel to Thailand. We are also responsible for raising enough money to assist in covering the cost of supplies, immunizations, and medications. As you can imagine, we have a great challenge ahead of us to raise enough funds to support the plans we have for this year’s trip. We have fundraising projects planned but we also wanted to reach out to our friends and loved ones and open the door for you to support us as well.

Project Thailand represents a tremendous opportunity to serve some underserved children of Thailand. It also provides an unparalleled educational experience for us as medical students interested in international community medicine. To see photos from previous years, please visit http://emergency.med.ufl.edu/community_service.shtml or scroll through last year's blog posts.

Finale

On our last night we were treated to the kids performing traditional Akha dances in their native dress.
This banner was unfurled at the end of the first dance....

Epilog

We are all home safe and sound. We are planning a picture swapping party and will begin the process of organizing our group and preparing for next year. We have to complete the medical records and I have sent David & Asa growth charts and they will enter the immunization records. We have several potential projects, buying immunizations, establishing sustainable protein with chicken coops, and of course planning the next mission. I have secured space at the upcoming Alachua County Medical Society's Product show and we'll sell some of the Akha art items we brought back. I am donating some black star sapphires to a silent auction and we may have a few other special items for auction.

I have played with a logo design for tagging our equipment and adding to T-shirts and other items we can use for fund raising. Hope you like it but input and suggestions are appreciated.

Elephant rides & Ice cream. The CGT kids have fun

Each team member treated 2 of the children ( who am I kidding we had fun too) to a day or elephant rides, lunch, cokes and ice cream.

Last Day in Bangkok

This overcast, windy day propelled many of us to spend a few hours shopping at the Chatuchak Weekend Market, a labyrinth of stalls selling fisherman pants, bright flowy dresses, silk pillowcases, silver jewelry, wares featuring elephants, orchids, lotus bulbs, green mango salad, fresh cut watermelon, and coconut juice right out of the coconut, among other things. One vendor/performer attracted customers by spinning around and around while he was pouring tandem cups of Thai iced tea. After weaving through the crowds, customers could get some reprieve with an hourlong Thai massage for 250 baht (about US$7). Since it was nearly impossible to navigate our way back to the Sky Train station, we bargained with a taxi driver for fare back to the hotel.

All 17 of us met up for one last dinner in Bangkok, this time with two of the Thai Emergency Medicine residents in their first and second year of their three-year program. We dined on the patio and ate family style to sample whole sea bass, tom yum soup, prawns, morning glories, and chilies in nearly every bite. On our way back to the hotel, we walked through aisles of night market stalls and came across the occasional baby elephant, leashed to be fed or ridden at a price. We caught three of the brightly-colored taxi cabs—hot pink, half-yellow half-green, lime green, royal purple, depending on the company—and flew down the highway toward the Suvarnabhumi Airport.

Mahidol University and the Grand Palace

It felt familiar this morning when I staggered out of bed onto the street in my scrubs and ate breakfast on the run. Adam, Angela, Courtney, India and I rode the skytrain to meet Dr. Ferguson on our way to the local teaching hospital. At the hospital, we met up with faculty of their emergency department and were able to chat with medical students and emergency medicine residents of the university, see their facilities and learn about how their department operates.

Patients are triaged based on vital signs and chief complaint into one of three acuity levels. We were told that the lowest acuity patients will wait about 2 hours to be seen in Bangkok. All patients are seen, regardless of their ability to pay, however patients are sometimes transferred after stabilization if they hold insurance with another hospital.

We were shown to the resuscitation bay, were we were amused to see a resident caring for a patient by holding a paper bag over the patient’s face (he was having hypocalcemic tetany exacerbated by hyperventilation). The resuscitation bay had a wall with all of the incubation gear laid out on hangers. Each patient care room had a statue of the Buddha. Adam learned the hard way not disrespect the Buddha by pointing a finger at the Buddha statues.

Throughout our tour of the facilities, we had an engaging discussion with faculty about the differences between our respective hospitals. This included systems issues like overcrowding and admission hold overs, as well as specific disease management issues, such as stroke treatment and tropical diseases. It was interesting to hear that physicians radio orders to the ambulance en route to the hospital in contrast to the more protocol driven system independent of physicians at home. Also, overcrowding in the Thailand ED was addressed through the use of an intermediate holding area between the emergency department and the ward floor.

Resident life seemed to be similar to the US in more ways than not, including the use of a simulation lab, sharing one cluttered resident lounge and having test anxiety (we happened to visit on a resident test day). Medical students and residents read textbooks and journal articles in English and receive lectures and discuss information with teachers in Thai. Their bookshelves had the same favorites as we do back home, including Tintinalli’s emergency medicine, William’s hematology and Nelson’s pediatrics.

We had lunch at the Mahidol University cafeteria, were we sampled various Thai dishes and fruit juices. We were astonished by how food could be so cheap but so good, and wondered how our lives might be different if we had access to the Thai cafeteria everyday back home instead of the Shand’s hospital food. Outside of the cafeteria, a poster session was being held for the various scientific disciplines at the university. The program for it included both English and Thai versions of the abstracts.

In the afternoon, we rode a boat bus down to visit the Grand Palace, were we learned about the traditions of the county and gawked at the beauty of sites like the Chapel of the Emerald Buddha. In the evening, the whole project group met up for dinner and ate Thai food before heading out to haggle at a night market.