December 31, 2014

Happy almost 2015!  We have four trips planned this year:  February, April, July, and October.  Contact us soon if you or someone you know would be interested in grabbing a spot on an upcoming trip!  We are also working hard on a website, but in the meantime you can keep up to date on all the news via Facebook or right here on our blog!

First up; Ke Nou is partnering with Global First Responders to send a team to the OSAPO clinic February 22-March 1.  Leading this trip is Sandra Beldor.  It isn't too late to sign up if you are interested in serving!  The team will be working in the clinic Monday-Friday with a rest day on Saturday and then will travel home on Sunday.  If you would like more information please contact us at missions@ke-nou.org.  If you would like to support a participant on the February Trip please use the PayPal Donate Now button and be sure and note the name of the participant you are supporting!  Ke Nou is a registered 501 (c) 3 non-profit with the IRS and all donations are tax deductible.  As always thank you for your love and support of our mission.

May 12, 2013 Fond Parisien, Haiti

Doug-
This evening finds me on the porch of the guest apartment at Haitian Christian Mission on the second day of a mission trip. This one isn't exactly a Ke Nou trip, it's led by Guesly Dessieux and is in conjunction with Corban University. Corban is a small Christian college in Oregon. Seventeen undergraduate health careers students are with 6 providers and 6 nurses for this trip.
Yesterday was for flying and unpacking, and not sleeping. The Oregon group started flying on Friday.
Today the team split into two groups each attending a different church and holding clinic in that church afterwards. My group went to the same church I wrote about in "Ghosts of Port-au-Prince" .
The church looks the same, 3 walls, still, 18 months later and nothing more rebuilt.
The ghosts feel like they are gone, though.
I don't know if it's like this with many disasters, but Port au Prince seems eager to put the earthquake behind them.  No one here talks about it much, although it's almost all anyone in the US knows about Haiti. It's good, I think, the moving past.
My fear, though is that Haiti, despite all its effort to rebuild, will again be caught off guard by the next disaster.
Church today was long. Not America long, Haiti long. 3 and a half hours. In Creole. I struggle to keep track of what's going on, thinking, at 2 hours in "That's a lot of reading and introductions, but was any of that a sermon?" Just then, Sabine leans over and whispers to me "he hasn't even begun to preach yet" And then he did. It was loud. It was passionate. It was 90 minutes. A confession: I struggle to stay awake in English services when I am actually following and interested in the preaching and I am not sleep deprived
Then clinic. I love the buzz and chaos and eagerness of the Haitian patients. This is an easy clinic. The kids are healthy, minor colds, allergies and scabies. The kids are shy and charming and peak in timid Creole.
We see 97 patients in a smooth 3 hours.
We get home, eat and play soccer against the local schoolkids. They are confident. They say they will score 10 goals on us. They score 2. We score 6.  I am easily the slowest and least skilled payer out there.
All in all a great day in Haiti.

Rose

Dear Family and Friends
I will be traveling to Haiti with Ke Nou Haiti Dec. 1-9 for a medication mission again this year. Please consider supporting my mission trip.My total cost of the trip is $1500. I have raised $550 so far and i need to raise the rest by Nov 10th. Funds can be donated via the Donation button available at http://kenouhaiti.blogspot.com/ please indicate in the memo/purpose line "mission trip of Rose Macharia”. Once you have donated please let me know so i can follow up. If you would rather send me the donation and any medical supplies please let me know.Thank you for your love and support of this mission

Goofy Challenge--Sabine Dessieux

My Friends,
How far will I go to help Haiti?
 Will you help me get there?
 January 12, 2013 will be the third anniversary of the Haiti Earthquake. In those three years, I have logged thousands of miles and given hundreds of volunteer hours and spent thousands of dollars of my own money participating in and leading medical mission trips to Haiti with the nonprofit group Ke Nou.
My connection to Haiti was forged from being born there, but I became bonded with the people in Haiti when I saw first hand not only the devastation brought by the earthquake, but the everyday crises that Haitians endure. Since the earthquake, many thousands of people: mothers, brothers, aunts, husbands, sons and daughters—mostly sons and daughters—have died. They have died from illnesses that in the US are easily prevented or treated.
Ke Nou has been able to provide much needed medication and food to the people of Haiti from past mission trips, and your support has meant so much, but we have a long way to go.
And I have a marathon, and a half.
On the anniversary of the earthquake, I will be running in the DisneyWorld Goofy Challenge in order to raise money for Ke Nou. I will be running a half marathon on Saturday, January 12 and then a full marathon on Sunday, January 13 for a total of 39.3 miles in two days.
Although it will be a challenge for me to complete this race, I will be especially motivated by the excitement of knowing that it will benefit such a worthy cause.
 I am asking friends and family to consider sponsoring me for this event. I have two ambitious goals – first to complete the runs without sustaining any bodily harm, and second to meet my personal goal of raising $3930 for Ke Nou Haiti.
I’ve never gone farther than 13.1 miles before, but with your help, I will get there.
Consider sponsoring a mile for $100, ½ mile for $50, or ¼ mile for $25. I would greatly appreciate any donation toward this goal.
All donations are tax deductible.
One day I hope that Haiti will be able to provide the medical care for its citizens, but until then please join me in supporting this very important cause.
Much Love,
Sabine Dessieux
 All donations to Ke Nou/ Missouri Haitian Relief Fund are tax deductible. Under "Purpose", please type "Sabine Goofy".

Missouri Haitian Relief Fund
PO Box 871 Jefferson City, MO, 65102

Quality--Standards of Care for medical mission trips

One of the great things about medical mission trips is that the record keeping is much less than our daily office or hospital lives.  In fact, on some clinic days, it is barely existent.  It feels great to not have a pile of paperwork staring you in the face at the end of the day.
We are changing that.
While we have no love of paperwork (just ask the nurses at my office), haphazard record keeping is not helping the patients we go to Haiti to serve.  We have a responsibility to our patients to document their care.  Turn it around.  If you were seeing a physician, and they kept no record of your condition or the medication they prescribed, would that be acceptable to you?
It is not acceptable to us.  It is tedious to document, but it is important.

This last trip, we started using a new encounter form that can document multiple visits, a problem list, medication list, and a photo.  We purchased a mobile printer  (Canon PIXMA iP100 Color Ink-jet printer)

 to print photos for those chart. We would like to work as the guinea pigs for developing a standard for medical mission groups working out of HCM  as well as other areas where we expand.
We will also audit a portion of the charts randomly for completeness and best practices.
If anyone knows of an easy way to do this electronically, I am all ears...We will be looking for low-cost portable electronic medical records as those would be ideal for our needs.

Starting with our next trip, we will require all applicants to submit current credentials, licensing, and each team member will apply for a specific role within the team (at least for the medical members).  All medical professionals will only be asked to function within their normal scope of practice on the trip.

Our name tags, starting next trip, will be issued as photo ID badges (we used ID badge-like name tags for this last trip, but no photos).

We have been working on a standardized formulary based on cost and appropriateness for the population we are serving.  We will develop standard dosing guides with recommendations for all medications within our formulary.

Finally, we will begin to offer at least two hours of medical education per trip on regionally specific conditions.  I will work to get those accredited for CME and CEU credits.

Our goal is to keep the standard of care on our mission trips as close as reasonably possible to the standard of care at home.  We welcome any suggestions in the comments here or on the facebook page.