Medical Aid To Nicaragua
Organization profile published 1982
Year Published: 1982
Resource Type: Organization
Cx Number: CX2534
Abstract:
In August 1979, a group of concerned health professionals and international development workers founded the committee for Medical Aid to Nicaragua (MATN). Initial activities focussed on emergency medical assistance for the thousands of Nicaraguans in need of health care. Preventive health care programmes had been virtually non-existent; malnutrition and poor sanitation had resulted in a high degree of child mortality and low life-expectancy. Added to this situation of chronic poverty was a serious earthquake in 1972 and the devastation of the war against the Somoza regime in which 13 hospitals were partially or totally destroyed, 50,000 people killed, thousands wounded, and over 40,000 children orphaned.
Since 1980, MATN has worked to support the long-term objectives of the Nicaraguan revolution and to promote a greater understanding of Nicaragua among Canadians by the participation of committee members in public forums and professional associations. To further this work, MATN is organizing a study tour of Nicaragua for the fall of 1982. The objectives of the tour are:
1. To provide Canadian health workers with the opportunity to compare the development of a grass roots, community-oriented health care system in a third world country with the established medical model in Canada with the objective of stimulating a critical analysis of the Canadian health system;
2. to allow an in-depth observation of areas of special interest to tour participants, i.e. training of village health workers, preventive health campaigns, rural health care services, medical , nursing, and paramedical training, occupational and environmental health, the work of FETSALUD (the Nicaraguan union of health workers);
3. to expand and improve tha quality of solidarity work in Canada in support of the Nicaraguan people.
For more information about the tour, contact MATN at the above address.
This organization no longer exists.
This abstract was published in the Connexions Digest in 1982.
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