Can a church in a poor and vulnerable community run a sustainable healthcare ministry in her community?
Yes, if the church and short term medical team are well prepared for ministry. Here are the steps we have taken to enable local churches run sustainable healthcare ministries as result of short term medical teams.
How can urban health care missions be done in urban settings, especially in government owned facilities? This breakout session seeks to address this questions. Ministry can be done in and through government hospitals and institutions by connecting with healthcare personnel, sharing the gospel and discipling them and bringing them into healthy churches. This breakout session will give some insights and specifics into how to do this.
This session will discuss ways to analyze future or current relationship for compatibility, ways to identify potential differences in five areas that affect their future or current marriage.This session will also give tools to adapt and adjust to the difficulties participants may encounter.
CARING ACROSS CULTURES
DR. M. KAMALINI KUMAR PhD. RN.
Practices and beliefs that center around illness, suffering, death and bereavement in patients from various ethnic backgrounds and belief systems can create many challenges for health care professionals. These beliefs also influence the way patients perceive the quality of care they receive. Research has shown that caregivers who are sensitive to the cultural and belief systems of patients can help not only to reduce their stress, but increase the compliance and satisfaction with the care they receive. Besides this obvious understanding of culture, there is the culture of the times we now live in. Which culture should we address and engage in? The traditional values of Christianity and the church or the contemporary culture of social reform, less binding commitments and sexual freedom of all kinds? We must grapple with these issues with wisdom and insight.
Knowing and remembering every person's cultural practices is a virtual impossibility, but understanding human relationships and connectedness is not. This seminar will explore the simple, but profound ways in which relationship-based care crosses cultural barriers in ways that transcend any strategy or program that ensures culturally competent care. It is based on the fact that God who created diversity has a culture that supersedes all other cultures. The practice of "God's culture" is what brings unity to our diversity and power to our caring. To quote Rachel Naomi Remen "Fixing and helping create a distance between people, but we cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected."
The goal of this seminar is to go beyond just knowledge of a person's culture in order to care for them, but to grasp the significance of care that is delivered not with professionalism alone but with the mystery of relational and incarnational living.
Long-term impact in health-related missions from a short-term team must consider both long-term and short-term goals and objectives. Perhaps surprisingly, some or many of the long-term impact might not be directly related to healthcare! Understanding the potential long-term goals and objectives requires the short-term team to explore coordinated interaction between communities, local leaders, government, and technical experts. This workshop will identify several models for interacting where short-term healthcare workers can explore how to have a lasting long-term impact, as well as highlighting pitfalls to be avoided.
