Physiotherapists provide Guatemala prosthetic care

Physiotherapists to provide prosthetic care in Guatemala

Islanders Shannon Jordan and Kerys Chamberlain are set to travel to Guatemala in October to provide prosthetic care.

The two physiotherapists are heading to Central America to support people who need prosthetic limbs.

Jordan and Chamberlain, from Guernsey, will spend 10 days in Guatemala helping with rehabilitation.

The pair will volunteer with the Range of Motion Project, an organisation founded in 2005 that offers life-changing prosthetic limbs, physical therapy and psychological support to patients in Guatemala and Ecuador.

They are due to leave later in October and said they also hoped to improve life for amputees in Guernsey when they return, by working with island charities.

Jordan said she wanted to help people live a full and active life, and that the pair were seeing "what is available to them and what we can do to help".

Chamberlain said that during the trip they would spend five days helping people physically, building their strength and getting them to a point where they could successfully use a prosthetic limb.

She said they would also visit patients previously helped by the organisation and see how the prosthetic limbs had "changed their quality of life".

The pair said they would work with technicians from America, which Chamberlain said would "be really interesting to see how our practice maybe differs and learn some new skills and tricks".

They said the people they would help had lost limbs for a range of reasons, including illness and accidents.

Back in Guernsey, Jordan said they were hoping to work with charities to support islanders getting "back to work or getting back to driving and kind of just being part of the community again post-discharge from hospital".

"Because there isn't actually anything here specifically for that."