Today’s Good People, Good Works will be presented in Khmer and English, with subtitles in Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mongolian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai.

We’ve received official recognition from the Ministry of Health in Cambodia that we are one of the teaching hospitals in Cambodia. We can provide good care and treatment to the patients and also we provide education and training to doctors and nurses who work in the countryside, or who work somewhere else in Cambodia.

Hallo, sincere viewers, and welcome to Good People, Good Works on Supreme Master Television. Today’s program features the conclusion of a two-part series that profiles Angkor Hospital for Children, a full-service pediatric hospital based in Siem Reap, Cambodia that provides compassionate charity medical care to the youngsters of the local community and neighboring provinces.

The hospital was established in 1999 by Friends Without A Border, a non-profit organization started by internationally acclaimed photographer Kenro Izu who travels the world taking images of sacred sites – from the pyramids of Egypt to the Caves of the 10,000 Buddhas in western China.

The facility provides outpatient, inpatient, acute, emergency, surgical, low-acuity, dental and ophthalmologic care, and has treated over 500,000 children since its establishment. It is one of the sites selected by the World Health Organization to host its Integrated Management of Children’s Illnesses training program.

Angkor Hospital for Children has more than 250 staff that all are Cambodian. In the beginning, there were a lot of expatriate doctors and nurses, that came to set up the system in our hospital. And then, they provided a lot of training to the Cambodian staff.

And by year 2003, most of the doctors and nurses that we trained before, they became higher level in their knowledge, and then the expatriate doctors, the expatriate staff they decided to leave and then they handed over the work to our Cambodian staff. So we have 35 Cambodian doctors and 105 Cambodian nurses.

Many international volunteers still come to serve at Angkor Hospital for Children and have contributed their time and talents to helping the hospital achieve its mission. Doctors, nurses, laboratory technicians, teachers, surgeons, carpenters, administrators and many others have offered their services in a spirit of charity, community and friendship. Dr. Michael Carter from the United Kingdom is one such person.

One of the things the hospital does really, really well here is understand and realize that they need to be working in the community as much as in the hospital. And it’s only in the community where you’ll save most lives.

I’ve worked in quite a few hospitals both as a student and as a doctor, and quite a few in the developing world. This one is a bit special. The ward we are standing in now is the intensive care unit – emergency room. And the ability to treat very sick patients is greater here than I’ve seen in almost any other developing country.

Angkor Hospital for Children is a training center for health professionals and each year hundreds benefit from the programs that seek to improve the quality of healthcare in Cambodia.

Every year we are having more than 300 nursing students that come to our hospital for clinical training. We have to collaborate with the Ministry of Health when they send the nursing students to be in our hospital to learn more about the nursing standards.

Besides nursing students, there are doctors or nurses who come from other referral hospitals that were sent by the Ministry of Health in Cambodia or sometimes requested by the World Health Organization that bring those people to us to train more about children’s diseases.

Angkor Hospital for Children has bettered healthcare access in the greater Siem Riep region by establishing satellite pediatric clinic in the Sot Nikum District.

Recently, we opened the satellite clinic; it is about 35 kilometers from our hospital and it’s located in a referral hospital that is run by the government. Over there, we took over the pediatric department. We opened on the 22nd of February this year, and the first day that we opened, we saw about 100 patients who came to our clinic there.

Without money they can’t buy clean water, or get access to clean water. They can’t buy antibiotics if needed. They can’t travel to the hospital if they are very sick. And that’s the one reason why Angkor Children’s Hospital has opened up a smaller satellite hospital in the community.

The reason that we opened that clinic is because we would like to build up the work of the referral hospital that is run by the government. Because there was a pediatric ward, but there were no patients. There are beds, but no patients stayed there.

So usually people traveled, they passed by that hospital or health center (and went) directly to our hospital here. So we think that if we build up the good work over there, then people will not have to travel so far just to get simple medical care or just to get primary care.

When we return, we’ll hear more about the caring work of Angkor Hospital for Children. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

The motivation – children are fun -- that’s the most important thing. They are hilarious.

Welcome back to today’s Good People, Good Works featuring Angkor Hospital for Children, a non-profit pediatric facility dedicated to improving the health and future of Cambodia’s underprivileged kids by providing comprehensive healthcare services.

I’m Michael Carter. I’m a doctor from England. I’ve been here for seven months working both on the wards and in the microbiology lab. I do some clinical work, although my role is really research, and in particular trying to define, to find out what type of bacteria cause and what type of viruses cause infections in the children that come into Angkor Hospital for Children. Once we know that, we can treat them much more effectively.

My name is Sinketh Raneth. I have been working in Angkor Hospital for Children for four years. And I love working in Angkor Hospital for Children because this hospital is a charity hospital and can help the Cambodian children so much.

The noble work of Angkor Hospital for Children has brought hope and a brighter future to many Cambodian children and their families. After they recover, some patients, out of gratitude for their excellent care, volunteer to work at the hospital to help other children in need. Ms. Arun now shares one of their touching stories.

There’s one patient that came to our hospital about 11 years ago when we started the hospital in the beginning. He was a landmine victim. Actually, he went out to the field with his friends. And then they all maybe five of them, they were together, and they saw the landmine on the land. And, they just played with it. And then that thing exploded. And he had a very bad injury.

So then his parents brought him to our hospital because the hospital in his village is not able to treat him. During the time that he was here, he was under treatment and care for a long time. One doctor said that his leg would need to be amputated. But then there’s one doctor from Hawaii, from the US, saying that maybe there is some way that they can help him.

So then they tried to find support and then brought him to Hawaii for one year. He was under the treatment and care in a hospital in Hawaii for one year. And then his leg did not need to be amputated. And then after that, he was getting better and then came back to Cambodia after staying there for one year.

So several years later, he came back and started volunteering with in the administrative department, just helping to run documents from one department to another department. And right now he’s in school. He’s in grade 10 and he still continues working with us by volunteering. I asked him, “What do you think about the hospital?” And he said, “I volunteer here because I want to get some experience, and also I want to give something in return.”

The staff of Angkor Hospital for Children knows that to significantly improve the health status of Cambodian children and adults, it is not enough to just offer high level medical care to the public. Informing the population about preventive health steps they can take in daily life is essential to reducing the need doctor visits and hospitalizations.

Underpinning all of this is education. It’s education, and particularly education for women that saves lives. People are short of vitamins, partly because I think their diet is based too much on rice, not enough from other vegetables. And in particular, the diet is based around white, polished rice.

If you polish rice, make it white and shiny, you lose the brown husk, which is full of a vitamin called thiamine. Thiamine deficiency is one of the biggest causes of admissions to this hospital and is probably a large contributor to the mortality rates in Cambodia.

We provide education and training to the community. I mean to the staff from the hotels or guest houses or any travel agency or public sector worker such as policeman or taxi driver, something like that, about first aid training, about hygiene, about HIV/AIDS awareness, and there is much more, mostly about something that people need to know for taking care of themselves.

We salute you, Sinketh Arun, Dr. Michael Carter, Sinketh Raneth and all the other Angkor Hospital for Children staff and volunteers for taking such good care of the children of Cambodia. We also laud Kenro Izu and Friends Without A Border for establishing the hospital and for their continuing support of the facility.

To further their noble work, Supreme Master Ching Hai is contributing US$10,000 with love to the Angkor Hospital for Children.

For more details on Angkor Hospital for Children, please visit www.AngkorHospital.org
To learn more about Friends Without A Border, please visit www.FWAB.org

Splendid viewers, thank you for your company on today’s program. Up next is The World Around Us after Noteworthy News. May we all know the love and greatness of Heaven.