Successful Vocational Training Team (VTT) Grant Continues
Posted by Bob Johnson
on Feb 08, 2015
The VTT project involving Rotary District 6630, Akron Children’s Hospital and Gift-of-Life-Northeast Ohio is still going strong. The intensive six week training program at ACH that involved 7 health care specialists from St. Damien’s Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti last October is about to enter its second phase. Watch the video from phase one.
A team of eight specialists from ACH including:
Dr. Jeff Kempf – Emergency Physician, Dir. Of Pediatric Global Health Partners
And team leader
Dr. John Pope – pediatric intensivist
Chris Weisbrod – hospital administrator
Jenifer Fitch – hospital administrator of global health
David Kahajda – biotech specialist
Cassie Karish – pharmacist
Erin Rosen – PICU nurse (pediatric intensive care)
Tracy Herstich – PICU nurse
This team that forms the second phase of the VTT will arrive in Haiti in early March, set up the pediatric intensive care unit at St. Damien’s and begin the final screenings of young patients for heart surgery. They will be joined and teamed up with other Gift-of-Life affiliated surgeons from France and Italy, seven nurses from New York and Boston and other many other specialists that will work alongside our VTT team from ACH. They plan on doing 12children’s heart surgeries over a six day period, conduct teaching and training sessions and then return home. The training of support staff that took place at ACH last October will put their new developed skills to work with the team.
This is all geared to culminate someday with a fully trained and staffed team of pediatric surgeons at St. Damien’s Hospital that will finally bring life saving heart surgeries to young children in a country that had none available before.
This has truly been a great example of Rotary’s humanitarian work throughout the world, the compassion and dedication of the caring and giving staff at ACH and the incredible dedication to better child health from Gift-of-Life-Northeast Ohio.