 | | Patients, family members and Health Care personnel |
“I recognise that we have a lot of amputees in Anguilla, and hence quite a few of them do not have any means of getting back into society due to the lack of a prosthesis to help them in their daily living,” Client Advocate at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, Cynthia Hughes-Richardson, told The Anguillian. “I have been taking some of them to St. Maarten to get fittings for the prosthesis. Having recognised that most of them are also diabetic, I thought this is an opportunity of getting them heretogether at this meeting for a lecture. They are some walking, but you wouldn’t believe that they have prosthetic legs.” She added that while they were fitted with such prosthetic limbs, they were in need of, and were receiving, rehabilitation assistance. Mrs. Hughes-Richardson was speaking at the Soroptimist Conference Centre on October 18, at the meeting attended by amputees, members of their family, hospital staff and visiting Physical Therapist with the White and Yellow Cross in St. Maarten, BetraBeut Martin. The St. Maarten official is also developing a rehabilitation service there with the involvement of an orthopedic instrument maker (from Curacao) and an occupational therapist.
“Over the years I have been specializing in the neurological diseases of the human body,” she stated.“I am also specializing in prosthesis because there is a high rate of diabetes patients in St. Maarten, as well as in Anguilla, and because of that we are seeing a lot of amputation patients.
“These amputation patients are very handicapped when they do not receive a prosthesis. In St. Maarten, we have a programme where once a month the orthopedic instrument maker comes and sees the patients together with me and a prosthesis is made for them. As a result, they are not handicapped anymore. They do not sit in a wheelchair and are at work. We have a high school teacher with amputation and he is teaching his science classes; there is a carpenter who works on a roof making beams and is wearing an upperprosthetic leg.”
Asked about her visit to Anguilla, she replied: “I was invited by Nurse Cynthia as we recently had some amputation patients from Anguilla coming to St. Maarten and obtained prosthetic legs or to get advice. People change over the years after an amputation so sometimes the prosthesis needs to be adjusted or a new foot has to be installed. It does wear out over time, and we had some new patients who never had a leg before and purchased their prosthesis from us and they are now walking.”
Asked about the cost of the prosthesis service, she explained that it depended on the activity levels of the patient. For example, a person walking very limitedly in the house might require a simple device while another doing field work would need a more expensive one. The cost of a basic lower leg prosthesis is between US$3,600 –US$4,000.
Ms.Martin began her assignment in Anguilla with a general lecture followed by a workshop with nurses and patients. “These patients “were guinea pigs because I wanted to teach the nurses how to bandage the stump or the residual limb in a good way,” she said. “Today it is a completely different matter. I will be looking at the different patients to assess the possibilities for them: if they have a stump or a prosthetic leg how to take care of it; and we are also going to do some walking. I see a lot of patients who have prosthetic legs but are not walking good. They have to learn how to walk with the prosthesis.”
The patients in Anguilla are also receiving much-need assistance from Physical Therapist, Khalida Banks. She was grateful to Ms. Martin for conducting the workshop free of charge. Ms. Banks said that rehabilitation was very important as there was a need for amputees to have good upper body strength to enable them to walk well once the healing process was completed.
The workshop was jointly-sponsored by the Health Authority of Anguilla and the Lions Club. The latter was represented by Lioness Civilla Kentish who is also the Coordinator for the National Aids Committee. She said that health awareness was one of the responsibilities of the Club which usually focused on the care of diabetics. |
