Experience that money can't buy

Voluntary work overseas can give health professionals a leg-up in their career, as well as experiences they would never have at home.

LAST month pharmacist Jason Bower cycled north to south across the rugged Swaziland countryside. It was the stuff of backpacker legends, complete with a close encounter with a deadly snake and a 20km climb into a headwind.

But Bower, 25, wasn't just sight-seeing or gathering fodder for future bragging rights. He was raising money to pay for the education of Yvonne, a 13-year-old long-term patient at Good Shepherd Hospital in Siteki, Swaziland, where he has been working for the past 5 1/2 months. Beaten by her stepmother so harshly that she suffered a spinal cord injury, Yvonne is permanently disabled.

"She was left for days before being found, and very nearly died," Bower says. "Otherwise she is a very bright and determined girl with lots of enthusiasm and vitality ... After a full year of physiotherapy she is just now taking her first steps again with a walking frame."

The $A5000 he and a friend raised will pay for tuition and living expenses for at least five years at the only school in Swaziland with facilities for students with disabilities. It will be the first time Yvonne has been to school.

Her story is one of many that Bower has to tell, less than a quarter of the way through his two-year contract with Australian Volunteers International, an organisation that recruits, prepares and supports volunteers to work in developing communities in Asia, the Pacific, Africa and the Middle East.

Lines of people waiting to see a doctor regularly fill the outpatient clinic and spill all the way down the side of the under-staffed and under-resourced hospital.

"Patients frequently have to get discharged while they are still extremely ill," he says. "Due to a mass shortage of beds, excess people are often lying on the floor in the wards."

There is, however, no shortage of work for Bower. He's found himself swathed in responsibility he would unlikely have been allotted in Australia, where he had had previous stints at St Vincent's Hospital and the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney.

Along with dispensing and supervising dispensing of medications, Bower's role has expanded to include education and training of both staff and students.

"I've been unexpectedly promoted to an academic - I'm the senior lecturer of pharmacology to the students at the nursing school," he says.

And it's a more significant role than it might sound. Due to the lack of doctors, nurses have a much broader range of responsibilities as well, including consulting, prescribing, and running entire clinics by themselves, so what Bower teaches is likely to have far-reaching effects.

That sort of hands-on experience and responsibility can make volunteering overseas a stand-out credential for young health professionals wanting something to add to their resume, says Michelle Yong, a medical registrar at Royal Melbourne Hospital who spent a year working at St John's Hospital in Malawi in 2003.

Part of Yong's motivation was to increase her experience in infectious diseases, in which she is now specialising. She says most of her supervisors had worked in Africa previously.

"Every day I'd see about 20 cases of malaria; I've seen maybe three or four here," Yong says. "I was one of only two doctors at the hospital and we had run the whole place. We were supervising, running the morning meetings, doing ward rounds ..."

Three days into the job, Yong found herself resuscitating a newborn baby who had stopped breathing, just as five other babies were about to be delivered.

"The strange thing is, when that happens there no one comes running," she says. "The baby did really well and the mother was so grateful she kept coming in to visit."

In a hospital with no ventilators or insulin, almost non-existent telephone contact with other hospitals, limited access to medications and equipment and not enough skilled workers to utilise the modern equipment they do get through donations, Yong says the treatments and diagnostic techniques she used in Malawi are ones she'll not likely put into practice again. But the responsibility and exposure to infectious diseases is a different story altogether.

"You're treating infectious diseases all the time - meningitis, malaria, TB, HIV - whereas here you're treating things like diabetes and skin and heart diseases and cancer. I got so much more exposure to disease presentations, even though the treatments were quite different."

Yong also formulated programs for malnutrition and HIV medications for pregnant women while she was there.

And there was no shortage of gratitude. "There was a big party for me when I arrived, and they tried to get me to stay five years. They even wanted to marry me off to a local Malawian!" she says.

Due to the enormous shortage of qualified health professionals in countries all around the world, there are many openings abroad.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) sends health professionals to more than 80 nations, focusing on emergency relief. The average MSF placement is for about six months, with volunteers heading to places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they are working with HIV patients and victims of sexual violence, war-torn regions such as Sudan, or countries affected by widespread poverty (and often violence), such as Colombia, where they're running mobile health clinics and other projects.

In fact MSF is urgently looking for nurses, midwives and doctors to head overseas between now and January 6.

MSF says its volunteers are required to have at least two years of recent experience in their field. They're also increasingly looking for laboratory scientists, as well as psychologists, anesthetists, surgeons and other medical professionals.

MSF does not recruit for specific countries, however. Volunteers go into a general pool and are sent on missions as the need arises. Recruitment nights are held about once a month in various Australian cities, with information listed on MSF's website.

The Australian Red Cross also keeps a database of health professionals who work overseas in both emergency relief and development contexts, for example as surgical ward nurses, peri-operative nurses or health delegates.

Australian Volunteers International's next recruitment drive starts today - and they will be holding information sessions around the country through the month. The organisation is looking to fill 16 health positions including nurses, doctors, physiotherapists and public health specialists. Among the positions up for grabs are a GP in East Timor, a radiologist in Lebanon, a speech therapist, psychologist, RN and midwife in Malawi and several others in Africa, Asia and the Pacific.

Most AVI positions are for between one to two years and all are fully supported including airfares, visas, insurance and living expenses. Volunteers are also given three to four weeks of intensive language training before they set off, and more as needed.

Along with the appropriate qualifications and experience, volunteers need to be adaptable and able to work with fewer resources than they do in Australia.

"The main things we're looking for are people who are flexible in their approach and sensitive to living in other cultures," a spokesperson for AVI says. "We're looking for people who are willing to go a bit out of their comfort zones."

AVI
www.australianvolunteers.com
MSF
www.msf.org.au
Australian Red Cross
www.redcross.org.au

by Lynnette Hoffman

Article from www.theaustralian.news.com.au