February 20th – March 7th 2015
This brand new hospital is located in the Dhar district with slightly over 25,000 inhabitants.
Our organisation established contact with Shishir Patel, the doctor responsible for the hospital who is also the founder of this institution. We had established the date of our first mission, which took place in February 2015.
Our intervention was required for the creation of the physiotherapy department, training and management of trained personnel, coordination of activities from Italy and through missions of expatriate personnel of our association. We were provided with free board and lodging, as in all projects in which our association has participated.
I was the participant in the mission together with my colleague Fortunata Romeo, to whom an infinite thanks goes for the profuse commitment, his competence, and for the contagious love for this splendid profession.
t was an incredible and unforgettable experience for a variety of reasons.
First of all, the incredible capacity for learning on the part of the sick (adults and children), which in our opinion can be traced back to the specific ‘culture’ of the body and of pain, typical of all Asian countries, allowed us to bypass many educational and sharing phases of the training, which in our country, for example, takes much longer, and often with barely acceptable results.
Then for the variety of pathologies treated, both in the orthopedic and neurological field.
Furthermore, during therapeutic sessions in hospital and at patients’ homes we observed passionate commitment of the individuals being treated as well as all their loved ones (always present in large numbers during hospital treatments).
Finally, we were pleasantly astonished by the support from the local team. We received the subsidies for the treatments from the first day: as soon as we arrived we communicated to the hospital maintenance managers the necessary materials and relative, precise and detailed measures, with the hope of being able to use them as soon as possible and throughout our stay. The following morning everything was ready, as the staff had been working all night (at the suggestion of Dr. Patel, the manager and founder of the hospital) to make them available!
Obviously, in the new structure there was no rehabilitation department or related therapists, so we quickly adapted a very large room to the purpose of rehabilitation and recovery department.
Given the excellent and unexpected results, we promised ourselves that we will return as soon as possible, after the managers of the hospital had identified existing figures of those to be trained (having the necessary requisites) for the on-the-job training. Local authorities and the university located in the capital Dhamnod were also involved within the large project previously agreed.