Treat blood cancer of thousands of people in Nepal

This past winter, you and other donors like you helped us train two physicians and a registered nurse from the Civil Service Hospital of Nepal to establish the country's first bone marrow transplant center. This center will soon be offering bone marrow transplant services directly benefiting  thousands of patients with blood cancers. Individual donors like you helped us raise $7436 for this project. Your donations helped us partially pay for the three trainees’ round trip airfare from Kathmandu to Chicago, housing during their training in Chicago, and monthly stipends for the duration of training.  

We are pleased to share with you that we are very close to bringing the bone marrow transplant services to the people of Nepal. The physical infrastructure has already been set up, three healthcare providers have been trained in bone marrow transplant, and the equipment purchase process is underway. We have received reports from the civil service hospital that the equipment will soon be purchased; and millions of people in Nepal and the neighboring Indian states will have access to Bone Marrow Transplant services. As you may recall, this will be Nepal’s first bone marrow transplant facility. Congratulations to you for being part of this historic achievement. 

Care of cancer patients requiring chemotherapy and  bone marrow transplant is highly specialized and requires valuable inputs from all team members including physicians and nurses. Patients undergoing bone marrow transplant are at a high risk for life threatening infections as their ability to fight infection is lowered during the process. These patients are best served by the expertise of a provider who is trained in management of such infections. The BTF’s next plan for this project is to train more physicians, nurses, and other healthcare providers in bone marrow transplant and in the management of infectious diseases. We are currently in talks with medical institutions in India to collaborate the training of these healthcare providers. 

With any project it undertakes, the BTF looks at the impact of your hard earned dollars in the communities it serves. To assess the impact of your donations to this project, we looked at the number of patients served by each provider trained under this project. If each physician provided their expertise to fifteen patients every day five days a week, there will be more than 3500 individuals per physician that benefit from your donations every year. This calculation does not keep in consideration the fact that these trained physicians will help train others, and more patients will benefit from those providers’ expertise. The impact of trained nursing staff is also similar. This is impact too big to ignore.  

We have started the work but it can not stop here. Considering the population of Nepal and the influx of medical tourists from neighboring India, we realize that once the bone marrow transplant services have started, we will soon feel the increase in need of the bone marrow transplant services. We need your help to make this happen. Will you help us train more doctors in bone marrow transplant and infectious disease?