The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is holding an “amputee follow-up camp” in Butawal, in the Rupandehi district in southern Nepal December 21-24. Collaborators include Partnership for New Life, Butwal, Nepal, Green Pastures Hospital, Pokhara, Nepal, and the Nepal Red Cross Society, Kathmandu. O&P practitioners will fit, adjust, and repair the prostheses of as many as 100 patient participants who hail from the districts of Rupandehi, Nawalparasi, Palpa and Kapilvastu.
“With time, a person’s height and weight changes, so artificial limbs have to be adjusted or repaired accordingly,” Jagadish Shrestha, head of the ICRC health department in Nepal was quoted as saying in the December 14 The Himalayan Times. “At least once every three years, the limb needs to be replaced altogether.”
Follow-up physical rehabilitation services are often out of the reach of the country’s underprivileged due to logistics and cost. The clinic will help offset some of these barriers. Shrestha explained, “Most of the patients at the camp come from poor families, so the ICRC covers the participants’ repair, travel, accommodation, and food costs.”
The ICRC has been running a physical rehabilitation program for disabled people since 2004 in Nepal, where it supports the Green Pastures Hospital and Yerahity Rehabilitation Center, Kathmandu, Nepal, by providing equipment, technical expertise, training, and financial resources.
