Content Resources

While embarking on a general surgical career as a worker in Africa, I found the breadth of surgical need far beyond my narrow thinking. General surgery gave way to gynecolgy, plastic surgery, orthopedics, urology, and ultimately neurosurgery as pertaining primarily to children with hydrocephalus and spina bifida. The rehab surgery has endured as my focus for the last thirty years. It has been a journey where there are few surgeons involved and where the huge needs seem to have opened a wonderful spiritual path.

As therapists working in developed countries we often have resources including specialized treatments and innovative state of the art equipment that allows us to do many special things for our patients. However when the therapist is in a situation where the resources become limited it takes planning and creativity to be able to meet the needs of your patients. In this session you will be presented with ways to think through the process of treating your patients even when resources are limited.

Fever is a common and recurrent diagnostic dilemma for medical providers in tropical regions or those who see international travelers. Patterns of fever and associated clinical findings often provide important clinical clues to direct diagnostic testing and therapy. Join in an interactive session that will review the causes of fever in various parts of the world. This session will focus on the diagnostic and therapeutic challenges for those who work in resource poor areas.

Infertility rates are highest in low resource countries and unfortunately these are the same areas where a woman's worth is frequently based upon her her child bearing abilities. This session will look at common causes of infertility and available treatment options

Travel to developing countries exposes one personally and professionally to new and unfamiliar diseases. This session will review real cases illustrating common tropical worms and germs. Join in the group discussion and diagnostic challenge.

Opportunities for mentoring , discipling and learning from majority world healthcare leaders of today and tomorrow have never been more available or diverse. Ministering healing in Jesus’ name can occur within CANs; within national nursing, medical and other allied health schools; and within a growing number of Christian university-based ,health professions schools. Making a long term commitment allows relationship based discipleship that can produce servant healers from among the Americas, Africa and Asia.

This session will outline the advantages of medical education missions compared to direct care missions, give examples of organizations with which attendees can participate in short term medical education missions, identify challenges participants face and ways they can be overcome, and provide examples of the long term impacts recent short term medical education missions have had.

The missionary nurse role has changed over the years from 'doer' of nursing to 'teacher' of nursing. Educational requirements and practice requirements have increased thus the missionary nurse must allow of increased preparation time. Language learning is a critical component of nursing and missions.

When the cultures of the care provider and the recipient of care differs, frequently it is difficult to complete an accurate assessment. Nurses need to be skilled at assessing clients from a variety of ethnicities, countries, and cultures. Elements of assessment will be described and ideas for overcoming potential barriers will suggested.

Traditional short term medical mission trips involve doing much work and seeing many patients. Many of the procedures can be taught to indigenous believers, allowing them an opportunity to learn new skills that can be used long after the team has gone home. These skills in turn allow access to areas of outreach not available to foreign workers. This breakout explores methods in use today that allow such outreach.

If you are ministering in a Muslim community, it is imperative to understand the cultural implications of Islam. This session will address those implications from a speaker that grew up in those communities.

It is the general idea that the short-term missions is one sided. Often creating dependency- teams from USA go to the underdeveloped country to help and bring short term relief and address felt needs in the comminutes of the countries they visit. While that may be true, ‘passing on of skills’ showcases how the trend can be reversed and these very missions can impact providing long term and sustainable projects and help move from ‘relief’ to ‘development’ and self sustaining mode. Caleb Rayapati, will show case how the “Pass on the skills” is making an impact on the ground, a firsthand account of the partnering mission using the Dental Outreach skills in self sustaining method, involved in community development in India impacting through practice of Biblical wholisim- a first hand account of how Indian Church has impacted using health care skills.