This post was first published online here. 

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Quetta is a difficult place to work.  A lot of babies come to our hospital alive and leave dead.  We have a neonatal intensive care unit and 30% of our tiny patients last month didn’t survive.  It’s really difficult to deal with, especially those of us who are not accustomed to tiny babies dying.

We do the best we can, and have much more resources in this project that I’ve seen in many MSF locations, but we struggle, because our patients come to us late.  We offer free healthcare and that is uncommon, and can be distrusted.  People can’t imagine that free care is good care.  People are accustomed to getting antibiotics a lot and they are accustomed to getting injectable drugs a lot – apparently, even when they are not medically needed.

Patients often come to us when the private clinics are worried that they might die, or when the parents have ran out of money.  They arrive in terrible states, having been injected with multiple heavy-duty antibiotics, sometimes with hospital acquired infections. They often arrive simply too late.

My job here, as project coordinator, is to try and maximize the impact we have with the resources available to us.  I try to keep the team motivated and working cohesively.  With 7 international and 253 local staff spread over Quetta Pediatric Hospital, Kuchlak Mother and Child centre and 4 other medical facilities, that’s a big team to keep pointing in the same direction, but I’m fortunate to have a good team and a team that is determined to do the best we can.

The mother and child centre has given over 45,000 outpatient consultations so far this year and we’ve vaccinated over 10,000 kids.  All for free.  Over 5,000 have been screened in our triage at the hospital and over 1,700 admitted.

I try to regularly chat to the Dads and check if they are happy with the service they received.  They are.  One had been to the mother and child centre 8 times, bringing women to give birth (4,000 babies have been born in our Kuchlak centre this year), some travel from Afghanistan to get treatment here.  But for all those success, it is the kids who don’t make it that keep us awake at night.

Visit msf.ca for more information about MSF in Canada

The post Trying to Stop Babies Dying appeared first on Kindercare Pediatrics.

After more than 4 years of civil war, more than 4 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes, most of them living in appalling conditions in Syria’s neighbouring countries. Half of them are children traumatized by war. An increasing number of desperate men, women and children are risking their lives along perilous migrant routes trying to reach Europe.  Few Syrian refugees make it to Canada. In January 2015, Ottawa pledged to bring in 11,300 Syrians over the next three years. And the government expects private sponsors to shoulder the majority of the financial burden for resettling these refugees.

We are a private group of concerned Torontonians – including doctors, nurses, educational, financial and environmental specialists – who want to act. A few months ago we founded the ‘Ripple Refugee Project’ with the goal of sponsoring a refugee family.

We have just been offered this opportunity through ‘Lifeline Syria’, an organization that aims at resettling at least 1,000 Syrian refugees in the Greater Toronto area over the next two years, emulating Canada’s incredible response in 1979, when Canada successfully resettled 60,000 Vietnamese “boat people”.

We will be sponsoring a Syrian family of eight who currently live in a refugee camp in Lebanon: grandparents, three adult sons – one of them handicapped – as well as a daughter-in-law and two young grand-daughters (5 and 7). The family’s house in Syria was first raided and then destroyed by a bomb. As violence and bombing in their area intensified they were forced to flee to Lebanon. They fear for their safety should they return to Syria, as they will be targeted on the basis of their religion.

The family has been approved by the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Canadian Government and is ready to travel. They will arrive in Toronto in only a few weeks, and we need to raise about $ 50,000 to cover the majority of their living expenses for their first year in Canada.

If you would like to donate to this initiative, please click here and select ‘Ripple Refugee Project‘

The donations will be handled by Ryerson University and you will be issued a tax receipt. Our group will be sponsoring additional refugee families in the future, so any donations above the $50,000 target will be used for those subsequent settlements.

We will be documenting the resettling process of the family on our blog (ripplerefugee.blogspot.ca) and facebook (ripplerefugeeproject)

The post The Ripple Refugee Project – Supporting Syrian Refugee Families in Toronto appeared first on Kindercare Pediatrics.