Supply Healthcare to Floating Villages in Cambodia

Commentary

For two, very long years The Lake Clinic-Cambodia has been living and working midst a global pandemic. With the start of 2022 we, in Cambodia, have seen a “return to normal”. No clinics needed to be canceled due to “cluster infections”, or fear of “community spread”.

So far, this has been a very good year.

Clinical Activities:

Clinics Held: 79

Patients: 1,448 women; 907 children 15 y.o. and younger, 491 men, and 34 Home-Care visits for the elderly and handicapped.

Total Medical Cases: 5,287

Total Services: 14,130. That includes:

2,830 Health Education,

2,828 Oral Health Education,

74 Dental,

119 Antenatal Care,

103 Birth Spacing (condom, IUD, implants and The Pill),

1,971 Birth Spacing Education for men and women,

156 Eye Care,

548 Vaccinations,

19 Mental Health visits,

and 15 Hospital/Specialist Referrals.

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Schools are in session

With schools in Cambodia now open with in-class learning, TLC’s Outreach Team, along with our clinicians are now able to provide health screening and health education to school children on the Tonle Sap Lake and the Steung Sen River.

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International Volunteers

With an easing of travel restrictions TLC has once again become available to medical volunteers. Drs. Helle and Erland of Norway decided to spend their honeymoon with The Lake Clinic. Their arrival via Singapore on 17 December. They stayed with us through the end of March.

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Focus on Outreach

As part of our on-going “Healthy Community Program” TLC’s Outreach Team engages in a number of projects all linked with the purpose to empower women through education and peer-to-peer support. Our Outreach Team also continues its “Children at Risk” project by going home to home each year to survey the nutritional status of children under 5 years of age, and then to follow-up on those children most at risk for malnutrition and its consequences.

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TLC’s Nary works with a Mothers Club to teach the care and feeding of infants-specifically the importance of breast feeding in the first six months.

In this 1^st Quarter 9 such gatherings have taken place as communities leave the need for “social distancing” behind.

Children at Risk, or CAR, is an extremely important project that identifies children whose biometrics show them to be small for their age due to malnutrition and in danger of a lifetime of stunted growth and possibly cognitive impairments. In this 1^st Quarter there has been 371 such measurements and follow-up visits conducted.

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Above, TLC’s Outreach Director, Kolyan, discusses a care plan for an undernourished young girl who is being provided with a high calorie, high vitamin supplement. Fourteen years ago, when TLC first started to work on the Tonle Sap Lake fully two-thirds of the children under 5 years of age were clinically malnourished, and one-third of those suffered from stunting and would never recover. A newer and more dynamic strategy is showing much improvement.

Clean Water is essential to good health and hygiene. TLC’s approach is to work directly with mothers and girls to set up bio-sand filters; teach their proper use, and to follow-up with those mothers and girls to encourage their use and to troubleshoot any problems that may exist.

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Biosand filters are provided on request by the family, and in Quarter One the Outreach Team has set up 189 new filters. By involving the women in the process of setting up and later troubleshooting, TLC brings the woman’s role in providing for the family to the forefront. We have seen the utilization of these filters increase dramatically as a result.

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Whether floating on the lake, or alongside the Steung Sen River, Home Gardens have become an essential source of additional nutrition due to the declining fish catch throughout the Tonle Sap basin.

TLC’s Outreach Team strongly encourages families, particularly the mothers, to try. TLC will provide the education as well as the seeds, and sometimes the tools necessary.

451 new gardens, both floating and land-based have been created across the nine villages on the Tonle Sap and along the sides of the Steung Sen River.

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In these first three months of 2022 there have been 992 Home Visits to meet the villagers face to face and to assess their needs for any of TLC’s services from clinical to other Outreach activities.

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Such meetings within the home, whether it is a planned follow-up or just a seemingly random visit goes a long way to establishing trust between the villagers and TLC. The Outreach Team will use these visits as an opportunity to learn what a family’s concerns might be, and to provide health teaching as well referral to the host of TLC’s services.

Mental Health: Because of their unparalleled  access to the homes of the villagers our Outreach Team is a source of referral to our Mental Health project that in this first quarter saw 19 counseling/clinical visits.

Domestic Violence

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“DM” is a huge problem in Cambodia, and on the lake where homes are small and there is no escape for its victims, TLC’s Outreach Team has been trained by the Cambodian Women’s Crisis Center to recognize DM in the families they meet, and to refer those families to our Mental Health project.

One More Number from Outreach:

Fifty classes covering such topics as healthy relationships, conflict resolution, good nutrition and communication skills were held as part of our Teen Education project. No photo is available.

In closing.

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It takes a special kind of person to work with TLC.

Links:

• Website
• The Lake Clinic on YouTube

• First_Quarter_2022.pdf (PDF)