For years we have talked about wanting and hoping to have the ability to provide Physical Therapy services to our patients, but not having a space or equipment to do it has been one of the set backs. Just recently, I got an email from a Church in the US (
THANKS ORONAZ) who has been a HUGE supporter of the Hospital through the years, who had received a donation towards missions and wondered what projects they might be able to use it for. After talking with them and giving them some options, they agreed to help us furnish our Physical Therapy Gym.
When we planned our old Admin Building reconstruction with Dental Clinic, we wanted to make room for other services as well, which is now starting to happen. Through the waiting room of the Dental Clinic - what used to be our Finance Department, is now the beginning of our Physical Therapy Department. We need some floor work yet, but we have the open space for our PT gym. We have had some applications for a Physical Therapist and hope to soon be able to start talking to them and finding the right person to work with us. We hope to provide both inpatient and outpatient physical therapy. We do a lot of Orthopedics here and have a lot of folks with broken bones who can use some PT, as well as our Stroke patients and post operative patients.
Through another door in our old Admin building is another room (Old RHS Director office) that is going to be transformed into a Vision Clinic. We are hoping to help the "blind to see." There are some optometry services in the country, but many are expensive and not feasible for the majority of our patient population. We don't plan to start out too high tech, but hope to be able to provide some reading glasses as well as some basic glasses to patients who are near sighted. We have partnered with
Great Faith Vision, who is helping us develop and get our program started. We hope, to be able to take our Vision Clinic out beyond our Hospital walls into the bush and partner with our Rural Clinics and church to bring sight to some of the people in the bush, who really have very limited ability to get glasses.
Despite the empty rooms right now - I am excited about what the future holds and the way God is opening up doors and bringing in partners to help with His Plans for Papua New Guinea through us.
