Text donations to assist Iraqi doctors

Dr. Sue Charette has been planning to donate her old microscope since she was in medical school, but she has been waiting for a good cause.

Now a clinical professor of geriatrics at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, she said she has found one in Books Without Borders.

The program, organized by the Medical Alumni Association in collaboration with other groups on campus, began to collect textbooks for Iraqi doctors last Monday.

The program is designed to help Iraqi doctors who generally do not have access to medical texts published after 1994, said Valerie Walker of the UCLA Medical Alumni Association. Though Charette’s microscope is not a typical donation for the book-oriented program, organizers agreed to take it in the interest of helping Iraqi doctors.

Sanctions imposed by the international community during Saddam Hussein’s rule isolated the country and prevented updated medical information from entering, said Dr. Laura Pacha, a preventive medicine officer for the U.S. Army. Pacha attended UCLA’s medical school on a scholarship from the Army and is currently serving in Iraq,

“During the Saddam regime, with all of the trade embargoes … it really kind of shut down Iraq, and Saddam wouldn’t allow doctors to go other places to train,” Pacha said in a phone interview from Iraq. “It really shut down progress in medicine.”

Iraqi doctors need textbooks because power shortages make Internet resources impractical, according to a statement from the U.S. Army. According to a flyer from the MAA, books written in English are useful to Iraqi medical professionals because the doctors are trained in English.

Books Without Borders needs all kinds of medical texts, especially books about anatomy, physiology and pharmacology.

Iraqi doctors and medical professionals in hospitals and universities across the northern region of Iraq will receive the books by fall at the latest, Pacha said.

Walker said it is important for the MAA to participate in this program because it fits into the organization’s broad mission of promoting medical education.

“By nature, doctors are caretakers,” Walker said. “UCLA needs to do this because we’re a major university and we can challenge other medical schools across the country to use their resources for the better good of the world.”

Planning for Books Without Borders began last month when Pacha sent an e-mail to the MAA. She said she was only picturing a brief note in the alumni newsletter asking for donations ““ but what she received instead was a coordinated effort from organizations across campus.

“All I was envisioning was a little one-paragraph somewhere and it just sort of blossomed,” Pacha said.

The MAA is working with the U.S. Army, UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, the UCLA School of Nursing, the UCLA Health Sciences Store, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, four other UC campuses and USC. Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University have also expressed interest in joining.

“We were able to get the project off the ground within a month of her sending us the original e-mail, which speaks really highly of UCLA,” Walker said. “(UCLA) really is a university that does collaborate and pool their resources together.”

Medical professionals have been targeted by insurgents, which has led many doctors to flee the country, Pacha said, adding that it is especially important to help those who have chosen to remain in Iraq.

“After the war there’s been … this huge brain drain. A lot of the doctors left when the war started, for their own safety and their family’s safety,” she said.

Books Without Borders is about improving health care for Iraqis, Walker said.

“It’s not a political project at all; it’s a humanitarian and medical one. It doesn’t matter whether you’re for the war or not, or you think the troops belong there or not ““ it’s really about the people that live there,” she said.

Pacha added that the effort to help Iraqi doctors is important because “disease and health care don’t recognize borders or country.”

Pacha would like to see Books Without Borders continue and, in the future, she would like to transfer some responsibility for the program to Iraqi government departments such as the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education.

The MAA is also willing to continue the program into the future, Walker said.

“As long as there are people that are willing to participate, and there are people that are willing to ship (the books) over there, we’re willing to continue the program,” she said.

Textbooks can be dropped off at the Health Sciences Store in the Center for Health Sciences (10833 Le Conte Ave.), and as an incentive for students to donate rather than sell back their books, the store is giving a 10 percent discount coupon to donors.

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