Rotary/Shriners Hospital Alliance
This project brings together two of the world leaders in philanthropic medicine for children. Rotary International has been a driving force in the eradication of polio worldwide in the mid-1980s. Since 1920, the 22 Shriners Hospital in the U.S., Canada and Mexico have provided medical care at no cost for over 800,000 children; the Hospitals specialize in pediatric orthopedic care, burn reconstruction and limb replacement for children under 18. The Hospitals serve children without regard to financial ability or health insurance, but with one simple criteria: can they benefit from the medical care the Shriners Hospitals offer? The goal of the Rotary/Shriners Alliance is to refer children to the Shriners Hospitals. This can be a life changing experience for the children and their families and is also beneficial to the Hospitals because they need more patients -- many of the Hospitals, including SHC--LA, have excess capacity and the funds to treat more children. So the Rotary/Shriners Alliance became a District 5280 project in June 2006 which continued until June 2008. But the project lives on through generosity of the Manhattan Beach Rotary Club. Approximately 40 children have been referred to SHC--LA through the Rotary/Shriners Alliance since 2006. More than one-half of those children have been referred by Dr. Carleton Wallace, a Board Certified Orthopedist from Riverside who will be our speaker on May 24, 2010. Dr. Wallace travels to rural Mexico every month as a volunteer "flying doctor" for Liga International. Our own Richard Ham is one of the pilots for Liga. On a Liga trip to Mexico in 2008, Richard, Roger Cox and Steve Stepanek spoke to Dr. Wallace about referring patients to SHC--LA and he has done so in a major way as you will learn on May 24th. The role of the Manhattan Beach Rotary Club in this project is keeping the Rotary Shriners/ Alliance alive and helping children from rural travel to the United States where the Shriners will pay for the remainder of the travel to SHC--LA. We support the efforts of Dr. Wallace, Liga and others in referring children to SHC--LA where they can receive medical care of the highest quality as well as emotional support and physical therapy. The Rotary/Shriners Alliance has also focused on the referral of children from California to SHC--LA but this has proven to be more challenging than bringing children from rural Mexico to Los Angeles; approximately 30% of our referrals have been of children who live in Southern California. The reasons for this are very complex and relate to the politics and practice of "poverty medicine" in the U.S. The Rotary/Shriners Alliance is grateful for the continuing support of the Manhattan Beach Rotary Club which has donated approximately $10,000 over the years to bring more than 25 children to SHC--LA. We salute our International Chairs Steve Stepanek and Donn Ennis for championing this case by including it as part of the International budget for the last few years. The value of the medical care received by the children we have referred to SHC-LA is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that is not how the Rotary/Shriners Alliance measures its success. We look at each child who benefits from the project as our goal. The year the project started, the annual theme of the Shriners Hospitals was "Healing the World, One Child at a Time." Our first great success was a boy named Ivan Arce from the mountains of Baja California who came to us and SHC-LA through Los Amigos De Los Californias. As a result of his treatment at SHC-LA, Ivan can now walk and, better yet, he can dance. The photos you see with this announcement are of Ivan and his Dad during their visit to SHC-LA.