The silent warriors

silent warriors seeing a patient with stroke

We met with Dr Thanh, director of district Health Center after 4 years. We was busy with the pilot NCD (non-communicable disease) program in Phu Tho, northern Vietnam so we had to discontinue the program due to the shortage of staff.

He called us to ask if we can help him with the NCD management in the district. Even now, these diseases have become national program but the staff is not trained to treat the diseases. Dr Thanh said “There is higher awareness in the community through the media so the health staff and patients know the importance of managing the diseases and it is easier to implement the project, not like back at the time you started it, you were THE SILENT WARRIORS”

That reminded us the time we first started the program on managing hypertension and diabetes at commune level clinics in rural area of Quang Nam in 2008 with 2 staff, 1 physician and 1 health educator. We provided a training session to talk about these chronic diseases for the doctors and nurses with a simple algorithm. We convinced the director to make changes to the available medications and we helped to train the staff by seeing the patients with them. Although it was difficult, we were happy because we could show Ministry of Health and World Health Organization the model and results.  We then got involved in developing a model for national pilot program.