WiRED Completes Latest Mission to Nicaragua

BY ALLISON KOZICHAROW AND BERNICE BORN

WiRED International announces the successful delivery of its most current Learning Center medical and health information to a leading medical school, and to hospitals and community organizations in the towns of La Trinidad, El Sauce, El Tololar and León. With this accomplishment WiRED now can run additional education programs and train-the-trainer sessions in these underserved places in Nicaragua.

In addition WiRED supplied projectors and laptops to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua-León (UNAN) to run WiRED’s updated education programs. WiRED worked with Dean Jorge Alemán Pineda, head of UNAN’s medical school, who praised the value of WiRED’s community health information, saying, “We are extremely pleased to have these [WiRED] tools not only in the state of León but also in others . . . where populations have been forgotten and are in extreme need of support.”

During sessions at the medical school WiRED trained physicians, nurses and community health workers on the contents of the WiRED Learning Center library so they could bring health training into their practices and outreach work.

WiRED’s health education modules cover topics of particular need and interest in Nicaragua, such as dehydration, diarrhea, and, most currently, the chikungunya virus. WiRED offers numerous Spanish-language versions of its courses and has plans to translate many more. During training, the WiRED team received suggestions for future topics and added yet more items on maternal and child health. WiRED’s library already contains more than a dozen modules related to the health of women and children, but will use the suggestions to expand the collection.

The WiRED team in Nicaragua was led by Director Gary Selnow, Ph.D., and Santiago Castellon, WiRED’s coordinator in Central America. WiRED’s aim is to offer the tools that enable patients and community members to participate in and take responsibility for their own health care.