Helping Guam's Kids

Helping Guam's children: Hawaii-based Shriners Hospital aids disabled kids
By Brett Kelman
Pacific Daily News
bmkelman@guampdn.com

Guam's children can find solace in the fact that doctors 4,000 miles away are working for them.

At the Shriners Hospital For Children in Honolulu, doctors work arduously to provide free medical treatment to children with orthopedic handicaps and birth defects across the Pacific. In January, two Shriners doctors visited the Department of Public Health and Social Services in Mangilao and diagnosed more than 500 disabled children in less than a week. Their next visit, when the Shriners Hospital will send three doctors and see even more children, is scheduled for sometime between June 20 and July 8.

In between, doctors will use a growing technology -- telemedicine -- to keep tabs on their young patients.
Telemedicine uses a satellite video feed to let doctors check up on patients who are thousands of miles away. The signal from Guam starts at Public Health, runs through the University of Guam's satellite radio station, into the University of Hawaii's satellite receiver and finally into the hospital's telemedicine station, where Dr. Craig Ono and other doctors can interpret a live feed.

"I've been associated with the Shriners Hospital for pretty much 15 years now and during that 15 years, we've always gone to Guam," said Ono, medical director of telemedicine at the Hawaii hospital. "We do conduct regular clinics in those (distant islands,) but we do not go there regularly, for example, on a monthly basis. We use telemedicine to increase access to care."

Shriners doctors visit Guam about every six months and the Federal States of Micronesia once a year, but through telemedicine, doctors can get updated X-rays or even study patients' movements much more often.

About 80 children from Guam await treatment at the Shriners Hospital, and Ono said the hospital is arranging transportation and scheduling for them.

The future
Shriners Hospital Administrator Stan Berry said telemedicine will be essential to the future of the hospital, which is being rebuilt. The $73 million hospital expansion will include 24 beds.

"I would say, in general, the telemedicine numbers represent a very small number of the patients that we serve, but it's growing," he said. About one-fifth of the hospital's patients come from off island.

"This hospital is being built for kids across a wide expansion of ocean, including Guam. It will serve populations for many years to come and it's all at no charge," he said. "We don't even have a billing department."

Brace building
On the other side of the Shriners Hospital, other specialists toil for Guam in a very different kind of lab.

A week after Ono and Dr. Ellen Raney visited Guam, orthopedic specialist Elton Bacon made a similar trip. He measured about 60 children the doctors thought would benefit from braces or prosthetics.

Ever since, Bacon and his crew have worked from more than 100 blueprints he brought back from Guam. From casts taken of children's arms and legs, Bacon will carve plaster molds and then build hard plastic, multi-colored braces.

"We are part metal shop, part wood shop and part bakery," Bacon said, surrounded by piles of half-constructed of arms and legs.

Bacon and the braces will return to Guam on March 10. He said the braces can skyrocket a child's quality of life.

Pacific Daily News magazine writer Jojo Santo Tomas and Visual Editor Cid Caser contributed to this report.