Provide a Posture Care Clinic for Mexican Children

It has been a busy spring at Therapies Unite as we rebuild our volunteer programme and develop our services again following the Covid-19 Pandemic. Since mid-April we have had a steady stream of volunteers from the UK arriving in Puerto Vallarta to support our projects, including our Director and entire Trustee board, alongside 5 student physiotherapists from Keele University and 3 skilled therapy and wheelchair volunteers. Having had our Trustee board out in Mexico has really helped us to see our charity vision more clearly and will allow us to drive our postural management project forwards over the coming months.

It has long been our wish and a key charity aim to provide all children and adults who need it with a high-quality specialised postural assessment, provide the equipment required for this and then continue to review each person on a yearly basis, or earlier if required. As children grow, their postural care needs change and equipment must be altered or replaced. During my 5 weeks in Puerto Vallarta in April and May, I had the opportunity to be a part of this, reviewing a number of children who we have known and supported as a charity since they were small and who are now teenagers. Witnessing these children being reassessed and provided with new equipment that better suits their needs has reinforced for me how essential our service is, being the only specialised seating supplier in the town. As a country, Mexico has a very limited supply of specialist seating, with most of the equipment being donated from overseas and distributed by charities. Postural management is a key educational development need for Mexican healthcare professionals and our clinic has plans to continue to develop our own local staff as well as teaching as many local professionals and healthcare students as we can. Your donations are vital in achieving this.

In recent months we have moved to a new clinic location in the more disadvantaged suburb of Pitillal, bringing our services closer to the homes of families who are most in need of our support. Our staff and volunteers are working hard to improve both the clinical and storage areas as well as sorting, repairing and cataloguing our stock of donated equipment. The clinical area has been redecorated in Therapies Unite blue and our volunteers are currently setting up a workshop area for our skilled wheelchair technician, Oscar, to work more easily. This will include purchasing a stock of commonly used parts so we can complete wheelchair and equipment repairs on the day of appointment, saving on time and freeing up appointments for others in need.

One of our aims for 2023 is to source more products locally, to become less reliant on importing equipment from the UK. Importing used equipment is an expensive and often slow and difficult process. As Mexico moves forward, more and more items are becoming available in-country and so we are looking to support local and national businesses, reduce our impact on the environment and reduce costs by sourcing locally as much as possible. As part of this, we will be purchasing a new, much more industrial sewing machine for our therapist Laura who has been doing some fantastic work over the past few years making items such as wheelchair harnesses and seat cushions as well as being able to create new wheelchair backs. The new sewing machine will be able to sew through thick wheelchair fabric which we are looking to source from Mexico City. This will allow our team to refurbish existing wheelchairs and reduce the need for new stock.

There are exciting times ahead for Therapies Unite and our Postural Management project and we look forward to updating you again in the coming months. I’d like to sign off this report with a great big THANK YOU to all of our supporters and donors without whom this project would not be possible. During my 5 weeks there I saw so many happy faces from our service users and their families as well as endless enthusiasm from our local team. With your ongoing donations we can continue to develop a high quality postural management service for the community of Puerto Vallarta, one that we are extremely proud of and that leads the way in developing disability services in Mexico.