Cambodia 2011 - Week 9

Our time here has come to an end!

Our last week took us away from the clinic room and to Kratie province about 315km northeast of Phnom Penh. We traveled with a team of surgeons, nurses and anaesthetists from the National Pediatric Hospital and medics visiting on behalf of the Noordhoff Craniofacial Foundation from Taiwan.

The medical team come out to the provinces as a way of reaching people who find it difficult  to visit the hospital due to lack of money for transport and who are unable to take time away from their work. 

The team worked incredibly hard and performed 49 operations over two days.  Post cleft surgery we visited patients and their families to give information about cleft lip/palate and home activities that can help with the development of speech sounds. We also handed out toothbrushes and gave dental hygiene advice. We had a lot of fun with children on the wards and entertained them with balloons and bubbles!

On Friday we delivered a presentation to 50 Taiwanese surgeons back at the NPH, which was a little daunting at first. We spoke about how speech is assessed in cleft patients and the speech and language therapy services offered at the NPH. The conference focused on multi-disciplinary care in cleft which we are glad to have been a part of. It was really interesting listening to other speakers and we made some great contacts for future links to the project.

Working in Cambodia has had many challenges and many highs; we have thoroughly enjoyed our time here. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without the support of everyone we’ve worked with – we’re so grateful and we’ll really miss them.  It has been satisfiying to see how things have evolved from the beginning of the project and that the work carried out each year by visiting speech and language therapists has been sustained.  We look forward to seeing further development and expansion of speech therapy services across Cambodia.