This week, Mr. Alex Blum, an active #HCLDR community member, will join us as our guest for Healthcare Leadership Tweet Chat. Alex served in Panama as a Peace Corps Volunteer with the Indigenous Ngobe Tribe. A fluent Ngobe speaker, Alex worked extensively with The Floating Doctors, a medical non-profit in the region, translating from Ngobe to English and Spanish. Since recently returning from The Peace Corps, he has worked to develop an innovative project to bring Emergency Responder Care to the inaccessible and disconnected area where he lived.
This short (and catchy) video describes the project:
While living with the Ngobe Tribe, without electricity or running water, Alex developed this project in conjunction with Ngobe community leaders. Seeing how the serendipitious arrival of The Floating Doctors medical team likely saved the leg of a young girl with a bad infection (see video below) has been an especially motivating factor in his commitment to this work. Though she got lucky, many others do not.
Alex has written two very interesting articles for the Seattle press that you mind interesting as well.
http://seattletacomanews.com/whats-big-data-why-does-it-matter/
http://seattletacomanews.com/what-is-it-about-women-that-makes-communities-stronger/
Alex is interested in learning what additional resources and methodologies could best support his efforts to bring sustainable change to this region of Panama. As multiple NIH studies have confirmed, introducing phone and internet access to a region leads to a substantial improvement in the health and wellness of the people that live there.
Below are the topics for our tweetchat:
- Question #1. How can Alex’s project work collaboratively with additional technologies and organizations to ensure it succeeds?
- Question #2. Open Mike: We wanted to give you the opportunity to ask Alex any Questions you may have at this time.
- Question #3. As Healthcare Leaders what closing thoughts would you like to share with Alex?
Please join us Tuesday March 12 at 8:30pm Eastern. All are welcome.
– Lisa
[Post chat update] It was a fantastic tweetchat with our special guest Alex Blum. You can read a transcript of the chat here (courtesy of our friends at Symplur). You can also see the analytics for this chat here
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