Saturday, December 5 marked the United Nations’ International Volunteer Day – a unique opportunity for volunteers and organizations to celebrate their efforts, to share their values, and to promote their work.
Volunteers are the heart of HVO; these highly-qualified health care providers from the US, Canada, the UK and Australia generously contribute their time, expertise and resources to improve global health.
HVO volunteers travel to project sites around the world, contributing their time to work with health care providers and students of health care in resource-scarce health systems. They share their expertise, teaching and training their overseas colleagues so that these health workers will be able to deliver more and better care to their patients, even after our volunteers return home. HVO volunteers also fund their own way – contributing financial resources to accomplish HVO’s mission. They give in so many ways to improve global health, and we are so grateful for their tireless efforts – efforts we celebrate on International Volunteer Day and beyond.
There are many volunteer success stories and impact reports from HVO project sites. One on-site coordinator reported of the work of HVO physical therapy volunteers:
We are very much pleased with the association we had with HVO. In re-evaluating the HVO program, the following are the specific outcomes resulted after teaching by HVO Volunteers:
PTs do better assessment of back pain patients;
PTs use different manual therapy techniques with good results;
PTs in multidisciplinary pain clinic are able to show good result in pain reduction;
Handouts given by HVO volunteers are useful in making home program handouts for patients;
Clinical reasoning skills of the PTs have improved, and they make better decisions.”
You can learn more about HVO volunteer impact by visiting Our Impact. You can also help support the amazing efforts of these volunteers by making a gift to HVO.