Those of you who follow the MalDent Project blog regularly will remember seeing these photos some months ago, when the dental chairs that have been donated by the NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde Oral Health Directorate were loaded onto our rented 7.5 tonne truck by Paul and Robert, two members of our great hospital portering team, and then delivered by Will McLean, Mike Broad and I to the Dentaid Headquarters near Salisbury.
Since then Stuart Bassham, Dentaid’s Workshop & Engineering Manager, has been working with his team of volunteers to ensure that all of the chairs are in good working order, replacing parts where necessary. In addition, Dentaid is donating six pre-clinical skills phantom head units, all of which they have refurbished and checked fully.
Excitement mounted in the week beginning 17 December, when this arrived in the Dentaid yard:
The next stage of the journey from the basement of Glasgow Dental Hospital to Lilongwe was about to begin and it was time for Stuart and his team to load all of the dental equipment that had been carefully serviced and repaired into the 33.2 cubic metres of this shipping container.
This is heavy work and Stuart and his team will have been more than ready for a good brew by the time they had finished:
Whilst their work is done for now, as the cargo rides the waves, Dentaid’s involvement is far from over. Stuart and a small team of engineers will be involved with the installation of the equipment after its arrival in Malawi, to ensure that the clinical facility and the pre-clinical skills laboratory in Lilongwe are fully functional to support both clinical service and teaching.
The involvement of Dentaid as a partner in this phase of the MalDent Project has been critical. I would particularly like to thank Andy Evans, the CEO of Dentaid, Jacqueline James, their Overseas Projects & Volunteering Manager, John Elkins, Finance Director and Stuart Bassham, Workshop & Engineering Manager, along with all the volunteers who have participated.
If you would like to support the work of Dentaid and its volunteers, there is some information here and lots more on their web-site at http://www.dentaid.org.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the generous financial support of Scottish Government International Development, without which none of this element of the MalDent Project would have been possible. You can follow their activities on Twitter @ScotGovID.
It just gets better and better, Jeremy! Merry Christmas and sincere thanks for your leadership at so many levels – international, national, local and personal. Thanks also for your friendship and fellowship. Kind regards, John
Sent from a Samsung Galaxy somewhere in the best small country in the world by a man who marvels at the One who made the galaxies.