Help Support Nursing Hearts' Efforts to Improve Health for Guatemalan Families and Develop Nurses to Meet Global Health Challenges
The Nursing Heart Team, pictured from left to right:
Cesar Santos (Clinical Director), Andrew Raphael (Executive Director), Blanqui Lopez (Partnerships Coordinator, Pharmacist), Walter Garcia (Operations Manager)
Visit the Nursing Heart website by clicking here to learn more about our history of supporting the health of Guatemalan families and helping Nurses grow in their practice!
Nursing Heart was founded in 2011 with the desire to help nurses keep their hearts in the work of caring for others while coordinating dignified, preventative, and often life-saving healthcare services. The families we work with have little access to basic health infrastructure and often suffer from extreme poverty, yet they open their hearts to visitors with smiles, kindness, and a deep appreciation for working together.
The mission of Nursing Heart is to improve the health of underserved families in Guatemala, and to develop nurses to face global public health challenges by creating personalized education and training programs for the nurses to learn and gain field experience through trusted partnerships.
To accomplish our mission, we provide medical care and health education for Guatemalan families by leveraging partnerships with other NGOs, governments, and international Universities; at the same time, we provide a Global Health Experience for Undergraduate and Advanced Practice Nurses primarily from the USA.
Our work is based on our beliefs that all people deserve access to dignified healthcare services and that every family in Guatemala has the right to seek preventative care with medical professionals who treat them with empathy, compassion, and kindness. Our work and our mission put us at a crucial point in the national and international healthcare ecosystem that enables us to connect Guatemalan families with both local healthcare professionals and the monthly cohorts of visiting licensed nurses and nurses in training who fulfill Nursing Heart’s mission.
We have provided consults and treatments to 11,000+ acute care clinic patients, attended 14,200+ primary school wellness clinic patients, and screened and treated 4,400+ women for cervical cancer, the most lethal form of cancer for women in Guatemala; through February 2023 Nursing Heart has provided 175 women with life-saving treatment for that disease. Furthermore, our Community Health Worker Program has trained 17 volunteers from communities we serve in chronic disease detection, prevention, and management, which has helped Nursing Heart better understand the landscape of community health in the regions where we work and has enabled communities to manage their own health with our support.
From everyone at Nursing Heart, thank you so much for your consideration and support for our work. We are deeply grateful for all of the donors, allies and partners who make this possible and we truly couldn't do it without you.
I welcome and encourage you to contact me anytime via email at director@nursingheart.org. With appreciation,
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Andrew Raphael
Executive Director