Ghana Medical Help

Today is #GivingTuesday! Whether it’s for responding to the pandemic or providing sustainable health programs for millions of underserved people living in northern Ghana, WE NEED YOUR HELP to continue catalyzing change. 100% of every donation you make on #GivingTuesday moves us closer to our goal of health equity in Ghana. Location of birth should not dictate a person’s health and fate!... It’s been a hard year on all of us, but generous giving to your local and global community is a way to help make 2020 a little bit better for everyone. We are in this together! Join us for #GivingTuesday! Donate today at https://ghanamedicalhelp.com/donate/ THANK YOU!

Today is Global Clinical Engineering Day! We are extremely proud of our GMH Engineering Project Communications Manager, Clement Appiah Anokye, who wrote an article published in today's Daily Graphic that features GMH to commemorate the day. This is a highly regarded, widely read national newspaper in Ghana, and it is a great honour to have our projects mentioned in it! Awesome job, Clement!!

Congratulations to our fearless Director of Ghana Operations, Dr Dominic Akaateba, who just completed and passed the West African College of Physicians and Surgeons exams to become an Internal Medicine Specialist! Dom is an incredible person as well as physician, and I'm super proud of getting to work alongside him for the past decade in running Ghana Medical Help. I'm one of the many people he inspires through his leadership and dedication to improve health equity in Ghana.... Congratulations and many cheers to him and his beautiful family! Kelly Director, GMH

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! Thank you for the love & support of our projects in Ghana.

Feeling off, unmotivated or just different than you used to? I highly recommend giving this article a read!

This upcoming Saturday is our second webinar in a five-part clinical engineering video series. Individuals who attend all five webinars and complete the survey at the end of each will receive a certificate of completion. Led by Mr John Zienaa, this online workshop will feature both local and international experts and include a Question & Answer period. The webinar will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel. Title: The Fundamentals of a Clinical Engineering Workspace ...Time: Sat Jun 13, 2020, 7PM Ghana time Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86455067415 The purpose of these webinars is to help improve rural health infrastructure in Ghana and create a global community of clinical engineers who can support and teach each other. If you'd like to support this project, send us an email at [email protected] or make a donation today at www.ghanamedicalhelp.com Looking forward to seeing you at the webinar! Stay healthy & well, The GMH Family

If you'd like to access the GMH Webinar on the Roles & Responsibilities of Clinical Engineers and Health Workers in the Fight Against Covid-19 in Ghana, please follow the link to where the video recording of the training session has been posted to YouTube.

**ATTENTION all Clinical Engineers and Health Workers in Ghana!** Ghana Medical Help & Ghana Health Services welcome you to an ONLINE WEBINAR this Sat April 25 at 7pm Ghana time on The Role of the Care Giver and Clinical Engineer in the Fight Against Covid-19. See the attached poster for details. A video recording will be posted here to freely access following the training. This is the first in a series of GMH online training Webinars aimed at improving rural health infrastr...ucture in Ghana and empowering local health workers ACROSS THE COUNTRY to provide better quality of care. This is the first GMH project that has taken its focus to the entire country, and not just the northernmost regions. In the light of Covid-19, everyone needs training and network support. GMH & our partners are here to help meet this need. Here is a short video that gives an explanation about how to join a zoom meeting. https://www.youtube.com/embed/hIkCmbvAHQQ

From all of us at GMH, we want to wish our volunteers, our ambassadors, our supporting doctors and nurses, our partners, and our loyal supporters a very HAPPY & HEALTHY HOLIDAY SEASON In whatever way you like to celebrate, each tradition typically shares the value of FAMILY. The unifying bond between everyone involved in GMH from around the world is this feeling of being a special part of the GMH FAMILY . Our family that drives change and empowers each other to be our best selves. With love and gratitude, we wish each and every one of you all the best as we step into the new year together May you and your loved ones be healthy & happy in 2020.

While this is the season for making time for loved ones and sharing special moments, let’s not forget that it’s also the season for overwhelming consumerism and marketing. Giving back to your local and global community in need is one way you can help offset the consequences of this. It’s also when charities will come at you left, right and center asking for your help. So, on the behalf of Ghana Medical Help, I’m going to make our ask *simple*: Our charity is **100% volunteer-...run with admin costs <4%**. We run capacity building healthcare projects in areas of Ghana with the poorest training opportunities and medical resources. We have no project that isn’t being run, monitored and maintained by locals. The people who recognize the need are the ones who we EMPOWER to drive the change that’s needed. That’s what we can promise your donation will do. *YOU will directly effect sustainable change that impacts thousands of lives.* Donations made to Ghana Medical Help this holiday season will go towards our GMH Ambassador Project, where we train critical medical skills to a cohort of nurses representing every rural hospital in the northernmost two Regions, who repeat the training locally for staff at their home facility. This results in training for hundreds of nurses, who provide care for millions of people. We have four clinical training workshops planned in 2020, but we can’t run them without your help. **With such little overhead, every donation, big or small, makes a significant difference in whether we can deliver these training programs or not.** Donations can be made online at www.ghanamedicalhelp.com Please consider us when deciding to make a charitable donation this year. All donations made on the behalf of a loved one will receive a CERTIFICATE OF DONATION + PICTURES AND A HANDWRITTEN CARD from a GMH Ambassador trainer in Ghana. Thank you most sincerely! Stay warm, happy & healthy as we move into winter! Kelly Aka. Dr Kelly Hadfield, Founder/Director GMH

Attention all GMH friends and family! Ghana Medical Help has reached its 10-year milestone and it couldn't have been reached without the faithful and generous support from all of you. Donors, volunteers, and supporters -- we cannot thank you enough for everything you have helped nurture. We invite you to read our latest newsletter which shares some of GMH's most proud highlights as well as the latest Ghana Medical Help Donor Report. ... https://mailchi.mp/bd5d6cbf1839/gmh10years

What an amazing day to teach essential life-saving skills to frontline health workers who need them the most! Today's medical training for northern rural health workers can only be described as a 'mega combo'! The first part of the day was a pre-hospital emergency care for physician assistants/nurses/midwives/CHWs in all 53 Heath Centers in the Upper West Region (region=province). Our rural nurse "Supertrainers" led this training brilliantly! Watching them train their 'superi...ors' from the larger health centers and hospitals was inspiring and deeply moving. The second part of the day was a comprehensive first aid training for adults and kids, led by the PlusOne team from the University of Science & Tech, Kumasi. Tomorrow, we repeat the whole thing over in the Upper East Region. Huzzah for empowerment & capacity building!! Huge shout out of gratitude to our Learning For Lives - Ghana partners from the University of Limerick & University of Limerick Hospital Group, who have been the force behind the 3 year project that has established this strong cohort of Supertrainers in Ghana. It's a project like none other! Special thank you to our Ghana Health Services partners and our superstar Dr Dominic Akaateba, GMH's ridiculously hardworking and incredibly talented Ghana Director of Operations. Thank you as well to our incredible donors who supported this project! If you'd like to help projects like this, please donate today at www.ghanamedicalhelp.com

We are extremely proud and happy to report how our Ghana Director of Operations, Dr Dominic Akaateba, is representing GMH at a terrific 3-day meeting symposium at the Queen Mary University of London to discuss collaborations regarding the effects of urbanization on health with all potential partners. Thanks for always doing us proud, Dominic! A tremendous leader and role model for us all. He gave an excellent presentation today that we were proud to share. Thank you to the GCRF for funding this meeting of minds.

This exciting project begins today! What a big week. Our training programs will include: - basic emergency medicine for rural and remote community nurses (the workshops will be conducted by the trainees from last year who excelled and have become instructors this year) - sepsis and hand hygiene - physiotherapy - newborn emergency care (neonatology) ... Updates & pictures to come soon! Huzzah for great collaborative effort coming to fruition!

We are very excited to welcome our Irish project counterparts to Ghana today! They traveled far to run the last phase of a enormous basic emergency medicine program that is training & providing medical kits to all rural & remote nurses in the Upper West Region. In addition, other Irish experts on the team will be running physiotherapy, neonatology & sepsis training workshops to appropriate staff in the region. Thank you to the University of Limerick, University of Limerick Hospital Group, Ghana Health Service, and Dr Dominic Akaateba from GMH who has been organizing & will lead all of the above. #learningforlives #collaborativesuccess

This Spring, *GMH and Ghana Health Services* teamed up to successfully run the 3rd Annual GMH BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING TRAINING CONFERENCE at the Wa Regional Health Directorate for all hospital engineers working in the Upper East and Upper West Regions. The purpose of this project is to improve the basic quality and availability of healthcare in northern Ghana by *empowering* hospital engineers. This helps to ensure that the equipment in these hospitals, especially those items... donated by GMH, are maintained appropriately and have a lasting impact. We provide comprehensive multi-day training and toolkits, tailored specifically to meet their greatest needs. An additional great outcome of these conferences has been the *creation of local, national and international NETWORKS*, which enables these isolated hospital engineers to access more support and learning. Special thank you to Dr. Bill Gentles, who traveled from Canada just to help lead the training at this conference!! If you’re impressed with the accountability and vision of GMH, please continue to support us by donating today at www.ghanamedicalhelp.com . We are a 100% volunteer run charity and can only continue projects like this with your help.

**CONGRATULATIONS** to our fearless Founder, who has just completed medical school and now leads our awesome organization as, Dr. Kelly Hadfield, MD !!

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY from all of us in the GMH Family!!! With a fierce female Founder and Director, GMH actively supports creating new opportunities for women in regions in a country where there's frequently a major gender bias. Today, we are proud to be working with the Canadian High Commission in Takoradi, Ghana at a major event for Junior & Sr High School girls to promote how women can pursue and take leading roles in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathema...tics (STEM). ** Photo credit: Enormous gratitude and love to the incredibly talented, generous and world renown photographer, Curtis Comeau, for taking these photos & letting GMH use them to help advance our cause.