AMCANI begins its efforts to bring free medical education to healthcare practitioners around the world with the goal of improving patient care world-wide.
Medical educational content and video donations are now being accepted and we now have a platform to share this knowledge with everyone.
Our first videos are posted on the AMCANI youtube channel.
More content to come.
To donate educational content, contact: jon@amcani.org
In December 2023 volunteers visited Vinmec International Hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam where they collaborated with local doctors and staff in educational lectures and complex neurosurgeries.
Thank you to Rebecca Clark Bash and J Jones for your amazing volunteer work and great pictures. Thank you to all the incredible volunteers that contributed!.
We have now completed our evaluation of Myanmar and have defined the mission. I met with the Ministry of Health for Rakhine Province, the head of Sittwe General Hospital as well as toured a number of large and small hospitals in the province. We have now defined a program that can maximize the equipment donations. The Minister will direct the equipment to the facilities where he and the local providers feel it is most needed. The Relief International Country Medical Director has volunteered to monitor the distribution on his own time as he spends much of his effort in the Rakhine District.Things are pretty desperate as you can see from the photos and they do not do justice to the human suffering. Myanmar is a poor emerging developing country and Rakhine Province is the one of the poorest. We can meet an unmet need that no other NGO is fulfilling by recycling the discards from the American hospitals. By reusing these items we can reduce the American waste stream as well as help a population of 3.2 million get access to health care that they now lack. Please donate what you can and share with your friends!
Warmest regards,
Gary
Hi everyone. An AMCANI team is leaving for Hue University next weekend. Members of the team will continue teaching Advanced Rehab techniques, neurosurgical nursing concepts and we will evaluate a potential collaboration with vascular surgery. I will complete the training on the navigation system and bring it on-line for the neurosurgical group there. We continue to work on our Myanmar project, but are still far short of our goal. We have raised enough to ship one container’s worth of material. However, we have now defined a program with the Ministry of Health that will yield maximal benefits of the donated supplies.
Although the Government of Myanmar is committed to advancing the health of the populace it is a daunting task. At a township hospital, the first line of defense for health care, there are little if any supplies and materials. The photos show the only surgical instruments that the doctor has to use (compared to the thousands in a modern American hospital) and the supplies on in the right side photo constitute the anesthesia system. No general anesthesia is available and patients undergo major abdominal and pelvic surgery with spinal anesthetic and IV sedation. Chest trauma requiring surgery is not survivable unless the patient can get to a district hospital, which can be 3-10 hours away by boat, car or moped.
We have now competed our evaluation of Myanmar and have defined the mission. I met with the Ministry of Health for Rahkine Province, the head of Sittwe General Hospital as well as toured a number of large and small hospitals in the province. We have now defined a program that can maximize the equipment donations. The Minister will direct the equipment (including the CT scanner) to the facilities where he and the local providers feel it is most needed. The Relief International Country Medical Director has volunteered to monitor the distribution on his own time as he spends much of his effort in the Rahkine District.Things are pretty desperate as you can see from the photos and they do not do justice to the human suffering. Myanmar is a poor emerging developing country and Rahkine Province is the one of the poorest. We can meet an unmet need that no other NGO is fulfilling by recycling the discards from the American hospitals. By reusing these items we can reduce the American waste stream as well as help a population of 1.5 million get access to health care that they now lack. Please donate what you can and share with your friend!
Warmest regards
Gary
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We have been refining the first cargo shipment list for Rahkine Myanmar! Much of the equipment on the first pass donation will be departing for Myanmar in about 6 weeks or so. They have requested we send gurneys, beds, operating microscopes, and an ortho fracture table. Now all we need to do please is make this thing go “viral” to increase donations to help with the shipping cost.
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We’ve started a GoFundMe campaign to help with Myanmar. See the website below for details and GIVE!With each $6,000 raised, AMCANI can ship a cargo container of durable medical supplies to Sittwe Hospital. If we raise $100,000 we can ship and install a CT scanner! Please help us get there!
http://www.gofundme.com/huwurw
AMCANI started work with the department of Neurosurgery at the Hue, University Vietnam in 2005. Over the course of numerous missions the collaboration as significantly elevated care in the department there. A few photos showing Gary Heit Ph.D.M.D. (AMCANI cofounder and medical director) teaching new techniques using the donated Zeiss Microscope AMCANI sent along. He’s working with faculty member Van Tri Truong who we partnered with extensively until he left for a series of overseas fellowships in Europe and Canada. He is expected to return to Hue in 2015. In the photo is Dr. Heit Ph.D.M.D. Dr. Van, and on the right Professor Duc Tran Thai, then Dean of the School of Nursing and Department Chairman of Neurosurgery. We are now focusing on nursing education as well as rehabilitation.
We are a 501.c.3 NGO that has been working in S.E. Asia since 2005. Our model is to recycle abandoned medical equipment (beds, microscopes, etc), take it overseas and train local health care providers in the use of this equipment. Since 2005, we've been refining our model while building a micro-neurosurgical unit in Hue University Hospital, Hue Vietnam. We have collected data that proves the validity of what we do and presented it at a major medical meeting. Now, we are expanding our focus on improving general medical care, in collaboration with Relief International, to northwest Myanmar's Rahkine province. Your financial support will fund the shipment of most of the contents of a 149 bed hospital that has been donated to us! What we do exactly with donations: Our overhead is only our banking fees and 99% of your tax deductible donation goes towards shipping and refurbishing the equipment that we ship.For every $4,000 dollars raised we can send a 40 foot cargo container of medical equipment. i.e. gurneys, beds, and x-ray machines to Rahkine. We have 149 beds to send and each container holds 36. We can ship badly needed x-ray machines, EKG machines, laboratory equipment, autoclaves, and even a CT scanner! We are in a unique position to introduce modern medical technology into an areas where none exist and then leverage that material donation by our teams of instructors. Using the AMCANI model, our medical teams will donate there time and effort to train the local practitioners to elevate their level of care using the donate equipment. But we need to get the equipment there! We have found that sustainable, modern, health care can be delivered by local practitioners once they have access and training to the tools of modern medicine. In combination with guidance as to what our local partners feel is most needed we can impact the lives of tens of thousands people . For the price of a dinner, won't you support us?
Thank you in advance for your generosity
Gary Heit Ph.D. M.D.Medical
Director and Co-Founder
Americare Neurosurgery International Inc.
Americare Neurosurgery International Inc (AMCANI) is a 501.c.3 NGO founded by Monica Gerstner RN and Gary Heit Ph.d.M.D. after a 2001 trip to Cuzco, Peru. We were doing the standard medical aid model of coming into town and “helping” by cranking out cases. On the plane ride out Monica asked Gary, “what happens now that we are gone?” That questions was seminal to to the formation of the idea of sustainable medical development coupled with a big dose of environmental and social justice implementing via recycling used but functional medical equipment.
The young lad was one of our first cases done under this model in Hue, Vietnam. The tumor would have been ultimately lethal unless removed, and to do so safely required a microscope (AMCANI donated) shown on right. Over the course of 6 missions since 2005 we have successfully helped Hue University build a modern neurosurgery department! We continue to support Hue in an expanded roll of general medical care, nursing, and rehabilitation. He did great and on last contact was disease free!
If you like our work, please “like” us and send this page to your friends. You may also go to amcani.org and hit the DONATE button. We are in critical needs of funds for our new Myanmar Project where we will be collaborating with Relief International to improve health care at Sittwe General Hospital in Rahkine Provence, Northwest Myanmar. We need the money to ship the contents of a donated 149 bed US hospital!
We are pleased to announce a collaboration with Relief International and will be working to supply resource and training to improve health care, using the AMCANI model, to Sittwe General Hosptial Myanmar!
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Americare Neurosurgery International Marc Vanefsky MD on the 2012 mission teaching Ngyuen Minh Thanh in the use of the donated microscope upgrade, a Leica OM3. This is the first case done in the new OR complex at the University. The only issue overall was accommodating Dr. Vanefsky… rare to see someone 6’8″ in Vietnam, let alone in the OR!
Americare Neurosurgery International Allen Efron M.D. working with our Vietnamese colleague on the 2012 mission.
For every $4,000 we raise, we are able to ship a 40-foot cargo container full of desperately needed medical equipment to our mission sites in Vietnam & Myanmar.
Our volunteer medical teams train the local practitioners to use the donated equipment, but we need your help to get it there!
