Peru Mission, 20th May – 3rd June 2017.
This campaign has been the first Varicose Veins organized by CIRUJANOS EN ACCIÓN in Peru. It was directed to the treatment of vein insufficiency in patients of few economic resources.
The operations took place at the Ventanilla Hospital where a previous campaign of abdominal hernia surgery had taken place. Given the success of that campaign and the welcome by the hospital professionals it was decided to organize the new campaign there.
The Ventanilla Hospital is found in the Callao region, Lima district, and it serves a population of 800.000 inhabitants. The hospital has 5 operation theaters, and during the campaign we could use two of them fully morning and evening.
The campaign lasted from May 20th to June 3rd, but for us it began much earlier with the gathering of material. On May 20th we, 7 members of the team, started from Zaragoza with 14 bags of medical-surgical material. The volume and weight of the bags was such that three of us travelled by bus to take all the material directly to terminal 4 of the Adolfo Suarez Barajas terminal, and the rest travelled in the Ave with some of the bags.
The meeting point for the whole team was terminal T4, where the Zaragoza people met the Madrid people. After covering all the bags with plastic we were all ready to start our journey. The Team was made up by 9 members: 2 vein surgeons (Virtudes Rico and Concha Bernados), 2 anaestheliologist (Lucía Gallego and Fernando Asensio), 1 radiologist (Nieves Alegre), 1 vein surgery resident (Christian Espinal), 2 instrument nurses (Mari Luz Remacha and Sara Luis), and 1 student from 5th year medicine (Íñigo Isern).
During the last months the Ventanilla Hospital has presented problems and changes in its political structure due to a new director, and this complicated our campaign even before our arrival. We did have the help of the new director, Wilber Espinoza, and the General Surgery chief, Luis Bernaola, without whose help and determination it would have been impossible to carry out our campaign.
After more than 12 hours flying we were warmly received by the Ventanilla Hospital team: Wilber Espinoza, Luis Bernaola, John Carrasco (general surgeon) and Kity, the head. Also Martha Vasquez received us, the Surgeons in Action member, who has been our Guardian Angel during our whole stay there and has made our experience in Perú much happier with her cheerfulness, her efficiency and her unselfish help at every moment.
We began the campaign on Sunday, the day after our arrival. The Hospital had about 100 patients with known vein insufficiency, bu without previous evaluation by a vein surgeon. Hence, our first labour that day was to select the surgical patients. We were planning to to begin operations on Monday so as to make the best use of the time at our disposal. So we organized 2 consults with Vein Surgeon and Anaesthetist so as to carry out the whole evaluation in a single visit. Some of the patients evaluated on the first days had a non-surgical vein insufficiency, so that we gave them some advice and means to improve their pathology.
Given to the political situation which I have already mentioned, and as a precaution in case the campaign could not be carried out, we had not made much propaganda in the media, so that at the beginning we had some doubts whether we would have enough patients for all our extensive preparation.
To our surprise the hospital organized a direct interview on Perú national television about our gratuitous campaign. This advertisement brought us a large amount of patients who began to phone and did so till the end of our campaign. So we handled patients not only from the Callao Region but also from such distant points as Arequipa, Huancayo and Heancavelica.
Our day began at 6:50 with our transfer from the San Miguel area till the Ventanilla Hospital. Carlos, our great driver, was waiting for us with “the mobility”, a van in which the 9 of us travelled each morning. This running could last between 40 minutes and more than 2 hours in the worst cases. Lima has a real traffic problem.
During the first week we examined patients in the morning and selected them in the evening, and in the second week we operated patients morning and evening given the great demand. 10 days of heavy work between consults and ooperations.
On the whole we examined 164 patients and did 109 interventions on 77 patients. Nieves Asensio cooperated with us giving ecodoppler to 72 patients.
Finally the demands exceeded all our expectations, and we operated as mane patients as possible, taking into account that some of the patients were complex, with active ulcers, varicotrombosis, and atypical varicose veins.
The Project had two objectives: to assist and to teach. Luis Bernaola remarked that one wf the strong point in our campaign was that we were two full surgical teams; sturgeon, anaesthetist and instrument dealer, so that they all could see us working as though we were in our own hospital. It was like working in Spain itself. These two teams were helped by the general surgeons of the Ventanilla Hospital (John Carrasco, Christian Córdova and uis Bernalos), general surgery residents (Julio and Ronal) and dealers in instruments and technicians from the hospital.
Special mention has to be made of the medical students who collaborated in the project, as without them our work would have been much harder. In Perú the students live in the hospital during their last year , and the work of Anita, Isolina and Hessier was essential. I don’t want to forget another student, Iñigo Isern, who came with us from Spain and who has collaborated with great enthusiasm during the whole campaign.
In a word, the human team has been perfect, and along all those long days we did create a great unity, a genuine Spanish-Peruvian unity which we hope will be maintained in new projects in subsequent campaigns given the great demand and the great collaboration of the Ventanilla Hospital.
Dra. Concha Bernardos