Boxing day dip in aid of Roka village and Hospital & THC

Chelsea Rich is organizing this fundraiser.

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A group of students, lecturers and their family from Teesside university will be doing the boxing day dip at Redcar in aid of Transform health care Cambodia and Roka referral hospital and roka village.

Khmer Rouge and the impact on healthcare:

Cambodia was unfortunately struck with major devastation in April 1975, when a radical group called the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot sieged power of the country, drastically changing the lives of Khmer citizens and the future of the country forever. Citizens of Cambodia were told that they needed to evacuate to the countryside because America was going to bomb the cities (citizens believed this due to America being at war with Vietnam at the time), this was the beginning of 4 years of hell and torture for innocent men, women and children. Pol Pot had the aim of taking Cambodia back to the ‘year zero’, forcing citizens to work as farmers; this extreme view also meant that anyone who was educated (or simply worse glasses which made them appear educated) would be executed. Children were thrown into caves and then beat to death if they did not die, and babies/ young children had their heads smashed against a tree in a brutal fashion. Extreme methods of torture were utilised, with Tuol Sleng being set up to inflict the most painful suffering imaginable, with one of the main methods being to be hung upside down and lowered into buckets of water or tied to beds/ shackled to the floor before being beaten to death. Many people would also starve to death or die from diseases throughout the 4 years due to the horrendous conditions they were forced to live in.

An estimated 1.5 – 3 million citizens sadly lost their lives at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and the effects of the devastation are still being felt today, 45 years since the end of the Khmer Rouge.

The impact on the healthcare system has been devastating due to the targeting of educated professionals, with only 32 doctors surviving the Khmer Rouge and 20 fleeing the country immediately after; the universities were unusable, medical equipment destroyed and books burned. This means that Cambodia have been fighting an uphill battle to re-develop their healthcare system and build it up from essentially nothing.

The charity:

Transform healthcare Cambodia is a UK based charity which was set up in 2010 with the aim of providing ‘healthcare education, training and clinical expertise’ to colleagues in Cambodia, to try and improve the healthcare system. Over the years, the charity has been able to contribute to the improvement of care by providing equipment, training or knowledge on the following:

- introducing the use of peak flow meters

- basic life support training

- management of paediatric emergencies

- dealing with alcoholic DTs

- chronic disease management in diabetes and hypertension

- child development

- occupational therapy rehabilitation

- pharmacy control procedure and hand hygiene

One of the charity board members Graham Jones is also a senior lecturer at Teesside University and has taken student trips to Cambodia on international placements since 2016: the aim of these trips is for the student nurses to build skills, cultural awareness, learn from a different healthcare setting and to also be able to share their knowledge and skills with Khmer colleagues. In conjunction with the charity, in July and November 2024 two separate sets of students attended Battambang, Cambodia on international placements that they had self-funded. The students were shocked to see just how drastically different the healthcare system in Cambodia was compared to the UK and have decided to try and raise money for one of the hospitals in particular, Roka Health Centre.

Roka Health Centre:

Roka Healthcare centre is a small hospital in Roka village; it has only 20 beds to cater for the entire village, which was previously hit by further devastation in 2014 when a “doctor” used the same syringes for injections on an extreme number of patients, resulting in 242 patients (aged 2-89) testing positive for HIV. 10 years on from the devastating and life changing incident, over 50 people have died from the disease, with around 260 people still living with HIV in Roka. It is impossible to know the true number of how many were affected due to people migrating to other villages, but due to the heinous actions of one individual, lives have been lost and children have contracted HIV from their mothers who were victims of Yem Chren. Many of the individuals are living in extreme poverty with little money and food, in makeshift homes, having to do whatever they can to survive. Many of the families cannot afford to send their children to school, meaning that the cycle of poverty is sadly likely to continue, with people struggling to find employment due to the lack of education. The conditions that the students witnessed families living in were so severe that students began to cry.

The Director of Roka Hospital, Dr Samnang dedicates his career to ensuring that healthcare for the citizens of Roka village improves; he has developed the hospital over the years, with it previously being even smaller than a 20-bed hospital. He spends large number of times in the community, providing medication and hygiene supplies to individuals needing support after their diagnosis of HIV and regularly holds health meetings in the community to educate people on symptoms of different common health conditions, e.g. diabetes and hypertension.

The hospital was tragically involved in a fire in 2018 that destroyed the building, equipment and medical records. Since the fire, the hospital has been working hard to get back to how it was before hand and to improve even further.

Dr Samnang is an extremely generous man who has dedicates his life to ensuring he helps people and has put so much time and effort into the hospital, that we believe it is important to try and assist him in his goal of improving healthcare in Roka village.