2026 Campain Kickoff

 

Hi Team USA,

First update as we kickoff our 2026 campaign.   I arrived in Vietnam last week and have been busy traveling to the remote provinces to train the local medical staff.    Our program has major expansion plans for 2026.   We will increase our area of impact from 15 provinces in 2025 to 27 provinces in 2026.  This expansion has caused us to change our patient screening process and rely more on local medical staff in the Provinces/Districts/Villages to help screen and evaluate patients for the program.   Because of this new model of screening the local team requested that I return to Vietnam early this year to help provide them with feedback and guidance on the new screening model.

After observing several training sessions I am struck by the amount of local medical staff that will be involved.    At each of our training sessions at the province level there were approx 140  local medical staff in attendance.   These individuals are government employees who work at the  District and Village level medical clinics within each province.  

The local staff will be tasked to achieve 3 primary objectives:

1. Screen local patients and refer to our program for potential surgery.
2. Contact local patients who received surgery from our program in 2025 for follow-up assessment.  Follow-up is critical for the well being of the child. 
3. Contact local patients who were approved for surgery in 2025 but did not return for surgery. Establish the reason why they did not return for surgery and invite them back for surgery in 2026.   It happens that we do get a small % of patients who are approved for surgery but do not return for us to perform the surgery.   Sometimes the child was ill or they did not fully understand the instructions.  Whatever the reason, we want the child to receive the surgery so we invite them back.   

Warm Regards,

Bob McGarry

Here are a few photo's from our training sessions: