Diabetes Care for Kaqchikel Maya

Dear friends, the intervening months since our last project report on our diabetes projects have been busy ones!

 

In particular, one of our newer staff members Herlinda, a nurse from Tecpan, has been working hard to get up to speed on all the ins and outs of our diabetes program. She is now stepping into the role of our main diabetes coordinator for the highland region. In this role, she travels between the various clinical sites where we have diabetes patients, meeting with them individually on a monthly basis to make sure that they are not having any trouble with their medications, to provide education on healthy nutrition, and to check for foot ulcers in our patients with more advanced diabetes. She also monitors for high blood pressure and other medical conditions in our diabetics who are at risk for these conditions. We are very excited to have Herlinda in this role, and she is doing a great job!

 

In other news, last month we had meetings with our collaborators at the Institute for Nutrition in Central America and Panama in preparation for launching our large collaborative diabetes project. The project is now moving through the final stages of approval from the ethics committee at the Guatemalan Ministry of Health and we hope to begin to start soon. This project will allow us to enroll an additional 350 diabetics in comprehensive educational programs and medical care programs for their diabetes, and we are excited to get going!

 

As always, we are very impressed by the committment of all of our donors, such as yourselves, to this project. We are so happy that you all recognize the importance of providing treatment for diabetes, and other devastating chronic diseases! Because of the prohibitive costs of medicines and medical care for most rural poor, it is only with your help that they can receive the care they need!

 

Thanks once again for your help, and feel free to send me any questions or feedback to peter@wuqukawoq.org.