Airmen help provide medical care in Nauru

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Chris Vadnais
REPUBLIC OF NAURU (AFPN) --  A U.S. Pacific Command team of Soldiers and Airmen deployed to the small island of Nauru in the south Pacific to provide medical assistance to patients and training to caregivers. The team will spend a week seeing patients, meeting with local officials, and sharing knowledge with the island's medical professionals.

Once among the world's richest nations, the Republic of Nauru is now in a dire financial state. Its once plentiful phosphate mine is depleted and the nation has not yet found another way to generate enough income to sustain itself.

Through an agreement with the Australian government, Nauru runs a processing facility for people seeking asylum in Australia. In return, the Australian government provides financial aid to the island.

But times are still hard for Nauruans.

According to the World Health Organization, Nauru leads the world in cases of type-2 diabetes, with over 40 percent of the 9,000 citizens on the island affected. As a result, kidney disease and heart disease are also common. Life expectancy for the average Nauruan is 58 for men and 62 for women.

Old, dilapidated buildings house medical facilities. Inside one of them, Dr. (U.S. Army Major) Noah Solomon, a nephrologist from Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, and Dr. (U.S. Army Capt.) Evan Brown, an internal medicine resident at Tripler, met with six dialysis patients. All 19 of the island's dialysis patients, including those six, suffer from end-stage renal disease due to diabetes.

Normally patients with this advanced stage renal disease would be under the close care of a nephrologist, but there isn't one on Nauru. A nephrologist visits from Australia once every six months and the patients are looked after by eight dialysis nurses.

"I think the biggest impact I can have here is to work with and train the dialysis nurses," said Dr. Solomon.

"Since there's no nephrologist here most of the time, they need to be able to perform many of the functions that a nephrologist does in order to optimize the level of care here," he said.

Dr. Solomon and Dr. Brown interviewed each of the patients, consulted their individual charts, and made suggestions to the nursing staff.

"I think they're doing very well with the resources they have," said Dr. Brown.

"But a visit from a nephrologist once every six months just isn't enough. What we did was adjust medications and dialysis parameters to make the patients more comfortable," he said.

PACOM's 12-person team also includes a pediatrician, nurses and medics, and a bioenvironmental technician, who is teaching Nauruans how to safely remove and dispose of asbestos, which is widely used in island structures, including its schools.

Air Force Maj. Brad Cogswell, international health specialist at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, is the Nauru team coordinator. He said unlike a Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP), which provides treatments and medicines, the goal of this mission is to provide public heath training.

"We're trying to build capacity and sustainability with these very focused activities we're doing," said Major Cogswell.

"We hope that what we leave behind they can use to improve their quality of life for the long term."

The Nauru mission is one part of a three-island effort that displays the Air Force's ability to quickly deliver relief in the form of medical and civil capabilities to remote areas of the Pacific. There are currently similar teams of Army, Navy and Air Force members on Kiribati and Vanuatu.