From virtual lectures to hands-on practice, our two day Spinal Surgery Workshop gave more than 25 neurosurgical residents from Bolivia and Paraguay an opportunity to advance their skills.

While it is not our primary focus, we recognize that advocacy is an important tool to promote access to safe, timely, and affordable surgeries for the patients we aim to serve. This past spring, we met with other global surgery experts to push for more investment in surgical services.

Our greatest teachers often are patients and their family members. It is through their eyes and experiences that we can begin to understand the challenges patients face in accessing a safe and timely surgery. On a recent trip with our Neurosurgery & Neurology Institute (NNI), I was humbled to learn more about Paraguay’s health system and culture from one such person. 

How do we measure our work? We can count surgeries performed and medical supplies delivered, but what about our equally important work fostering relationships? The XXI Bolivian Congress of Neurosurgery in Santa Cruz reminded us of the power of relationships to improve access to safe and timely medical care.

Home visits with our patients are an opportunity to pause, to look at the richness of others, and to examine our own comfortable world. We were grateful for the opportunity to visit two of our pacemaker patients this week.

A first of its kind diagnostic campaign screened more than 60 children for congenital heart diseases in the city of Tarija.

Our Extraordinary Support Program has reached more than 600 patients—with medical assistance and hope—since its inception in August 2020.

Following the model of our surgical programs, we are expanding support to hundreds more patients in Bolivia.

Maria Eugenia Brockmann, friend of Solidarity Bridge, shares a first-hand account of how she and her fellow Bolivians are experiencing this pandemic.

As we undergo this period of isolation due to the coronavirus, we want to remain close to our friends, partners, and patients in Bolivia. To keep you connected to the Bolivian reality, we are sharing this update, relayed by our colleague in Cochabamba. 

The 2019 Oncological Surgery Mission Trip concluded in Santa Cruz on April 13. As with everything we do, it took an untold numbers of individuals and institutions working in solidarity to make this mission trip possible.