Guatemala

Hospital de la Familia is a private medical center in Nuevo Progreso, Guatemala which hosts rotating teams of volunteer medical and surgical teams from the U.S. and Canada several times a year. NYU Ophthalmology participates in a biennial trip with other ophthalmologists from around the country along with otorhinolaryngologists and plastic surgeons.

Throughout the year, the hospital’s full time staff screens and selects surgical candidates from the community. Families of children who have serious medical problems travel from all over Northwestern Guatemala and Southern Mexico for the chance to receive life changing medical care from the gifted hands of the visiting staff.

To maximize the hospital’s resources, surgeries were done in a large sterile operating room where several procedures would be performed on multiple children by separate surgical teams.  There were no curtains separating the eye muscle procedures from cleft palate repair or dermoid tumor removal.

As the only pediatric cataract surgeon on the trip, Dr. Nam spent several days performing cataract surgery on young children with large, untreated, lens opacities, often congenital and blinding. Cataract surgeries were performed in a private sterile operating area due to the higher risk and more devastating long-term effects of infection following an intraocular surgery. Each morning, several tons of large and expensive machinery specialized for cataract surgery had to be carefully carried uphill from their storage facility to the operating room for the day and were returned down the mountain to storage each night. After the surgery, the delicate post-operative care instructions were stressed once more, and each family was given several months of post-operative medication.