Mission

Village Health and Community Development is committed to improving the health of Cambodian school children by improving the knowledge of Cambodian nurses.

Vision

Placing a locally trained nurse in a school to treat and advise children can be dangerous. Cambodian nursing schools are lecture based and cover much less material than required. Despite the inadequate education Cambodian nurses receive, they may evaluate, diagnose and treat patients without restrictions. There appears to be a disconnect between what is taught and what is allowed. BulletCambodians schools benefit from a properly trained nurse. Training a nurse requires understanding of the deficiencies in Cambodian nurse training. They need hands on experience. We place them in schools where they can benefit from direct patient care. We then mentor and monitor them on a daily, monthly and quarterly basis with feedback and lectures.

Goal

In turn we enlightened ourselves by appreciating the marvel of the Cambodian culture. Having been through mass genocide they are resilient people who are working hard to rebuild their community into a functional society. In Cambodia there will be struggles for generations to come and every bit of encouragement to the country’s young aids in their recovery. We are proud to have been a part of that progress. We delineated our goals, met many of them, fell short on others, but felt accomplished in our effort. We are a small organization with limited people to execute our mission. That mission was to educate local Cambodian nurses empowering them to either gain access to larger organizations where they can advance their careers or remain in their villages and become trusted advisors to the community. We met that goal. Our nurses spent years receiving daily electronic feedback, monthly lectures on increasingly difficult medical topics, and quarterly nurse seminars for which they were required a passing grade to advance to the next level. The lecture topics were becoming sophisticated and it was clear we had reached the saturation point. To continue the current course would have deviated from our above mentioned goals. It was time to close, time to place our nurses in the care of larger, better funded organizations who could help further their careers. When reflecting on the accumulation of skills and knowledge our nurses obtained over our 4 years, there is nothing but a sense of achievement. Please click on the icons to the right to learn more about our achievements listed below.