The FSM-Yap AHEC is in year 3 of existence and has a 12 member board of healthcare workers and community members that also performs oversight of the new Wa’ab CHC. Thane Hancock, MD is center director. Major accomplishments of the FSM-Yap AHEC include health assistant training for 27, nursing training for 17, radiology technician training for 11, and pharmacy technician training for 9. The Yap AHEC has successfully adapted the College of Micronesia’s (COM) year-long formal curriculum for health assistants and delivered it via distance learning to the health aids in the most remote parts of Yap. The sites are currently most reliably linked with one another by single side band radio that has received replacement batteries and connectivity upgrades as part of the current AHEC grant funding. This is the major health network for this isolated region. Training takes place every morning using this radio system, with the visual support of handouts and textbooks that are distributed in advance by the twice-monthly field ship.

Dr. Yolwa, who speaks the local language of Woleain, travels island-to-island on the field ship at intervals of 1-2 months to distribute materials, reinforce lessons face-to-face and conduct examinations. Previously, Dr. Victor Ngaden, senior physician at the Department of Health Services supervised the practicum training of all 27 health assistants during their stays or visits in Yap proper. He also taught 8 community health workers using the same curriculum, but in Yapese. Dr. Ngaden also supervised clinical nursing rotations at the community health center and central hospital and teaches academic and community nursing to 17 nurses through a partnership between the Palau Community College and the Yap Hospital. Practical nurses who are actively employed in the hospital are provided time to participate in classes on hospital grounds, and perform clinical rotations at the hospital and community health center. With model AHEC funds the Yap AHEC will complete pharmacy technician training, and institutionalize the training for health assistants and nursing students.

On the tiny island of Yap in the far western Pacific, a new medical library has been created to replace the one destroyed in Typhoon Sudal in 2004. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation's largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all people, working together with Guam's Ayuda Foundation funded a project to establish this new Yap State Hospital Medical Library. Librarians Arlene Cohen and Alice Hadley of Guam worked with Drs. Mark Durand and Thane Hancock; Medical Library Manager Charlene Laamtal; and Daisy Gilmatam, the Information Technology Technician at the Yap State Hospital to create this new facility.

Things can move slowly in the tropics and then suddenly race by. This project was one of these. The project originated when Dr. Durand from Yap State Hospital contacted the Ayuda Foundation in Guam about replacing their typhoon damaged library in late 2005. Carlotta Leon Guerrero, Executive Director of Ayuda, contacted Arlene Cohen, then a librarian at the University of Guam, who has worked on library resource sharing and development in Micronesia for over 20 years. Cohen brought in Alice Hadley, medical librarian at the United States Naval Hospital, Guam, to provide her expertise in small medical libraries. The original grant application went to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2006. After a few rounds of tweaking and revising, Ayuda received the funds in December 2007 for the Yap State Hospital Medical Library.

...Read more about Yap AHEC's new medical library