Sue Jennings and Wendy Edmundson, Practice Nurse Educators
On 16 October, Sue Jennings, Practice Nurse Educator for John Radcliffe Hospital theatres, will be flying out to visit Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) in Moshi, Tanzania. Sue will be travelling with the charity OK Links |(Oxford and Kilimanjaro Links), which has been formed by a group of Oxford healthcare professionals who, are engaged in a two-way transfer of skills with clinicians in Tanzania.
Sue, who has been a theatre nurse for 13 years, is going to share her skills with the doctors and nurses at KCMC and hold a training session about resuscitation. When arranging the session, Sue was surprised to discover the medical centre does not have a defibrillator, so she decided to start fundraising. "At the moment, any patient that suffers a cardiac arrest in KCMC has a very poor chance of survival, due to the lack of staff training and a shortage of appropriate equipment. I am going to train the staff, but without a defibrillator only a small proportion of patients will survive a cardiac arrest", she explained.
"Tanzania is such a wonderful country, I am really excited to be going to meet the team and to see how they work in such a different environment to ours in the UK. A defibrillator will help save hundreds of lives every year and you can't put a price on that."
For anyone wishing to donate to OK Links, cheques should be made payable to 'OK Links' and sent to:
Charitable Funds Department
Manor House
Headley Way
Headington
Oxford OX3 9DZ
Contact: Laura Carpenter, Media and Communications Unit
Contact Details: 01865 231471