Our hospital is located in a very rural part of Eastern Kenya.Our patients are generally very poor and our mission is to try to serve them at our best, without excluding anybody due to financial constraints.
For years I had been witnessing to the very sad reality that orthopedic care in our area is only for the rich: implants are very expensive; surgeons are rare and costly to the patients; hospitals able to perform orthopedic surgery are few and equally unaffordable to the majority.
The normal picture was that most of our patients would not afford surgical treatment for fractures, and they would end up being disabled forever, a burden for the family, miserable and more poor day after day.
Most of the beggars in our villages were in fact people abandoned by the family after an untreated fracture, and pushed by circumstances to sit at the side of the road to show their disability to the passerby, in order to get some coin or some food.I had tried to do my best to address such situations, but the cost of implants was so high that our poor finances could not afford them.
Actually I was operating some patients, mostly using plates, which are not the best solution anyway, because they do not assure good stability and require the patients to bed rest for more than a month after operation.
That was still meaning long time in hospital, long time out of job, long time far from the family. Sometimes such operations were heavily burdened by severe complications, even life threatening for the patient…and that was due to the cast I was pushed to apply and to the long term immobilization.
The true revolution in that sad situation, in which I often felt like a useless spectator, come with our providential meeting with Sign Fracture Care International.