MedicalMissions.org Physician and Advanced Practitioner of the Year winners
The 2018 MedicalMissions.org Physician and Advanced Practitioner of the Year winners have been announced: Dr Theodore Belanger, a spine surgeon from Texas, US, and Nanette Laufik, a physician assistant from Oregon, US, are this year’s winning physician and advanced practitioner, respectively.
The awards are given to professionals who have devoted their working lives to caring for people through medical mission work, both in the US and internationally. The winners were announced by LocumTenens.com, which specialises in the temporary placement of physicians, certified registered nurse anaesthetists, physician assistants and nurse practitioners at healthcare facilities across the US.
LocumTenens.com said that Dr Belanger has been a driving force behind the Conscience International Ethiopia Project since 2010. He formed the Project with a fellow orthopaedic surgeon and through a partnership with local physicians in Ethiopia, with the goal of providing complex surgical spine care to the indigent people of Ethiopia. Through the project, his team has performed more than 125 spinal surgeries, free of charge. “Medical mission work brings me back to the purest form of healthcare, providing aid to the suffering without concerns like declining reimbursement, on-call obligations, competition with others, politics, bureaucracy and customer dissatisfaction posts on the internet clouding the joy of providing medical care,” he said.
Laufik’s mission work began in 1999 in Shkoder, Albania during the Kosavar refugee crisis, and she has since served in Honduras, Afghanistan, Banda Aceh, Indonesia, coastal Indonesia on the USS Mercy, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and Vietnam. In the US, she assisted in Gulfport, Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina and worked in Inupiaq villages in Alaska in the Arctic Circle. “My involvement in medical missions is a way to show thanks for what I've been granted in life and to let people in other countries know the world hasn't forgotten them, even if what we can do is so limited,” she said.
Chris Franklin, President of LocumTenens.com, said: “Dr Theodore Belanger and Nanette Laufik are true servant leaders. We are honoured and humbled to present these selfless and inspiring clinicians the Physician and Advanced Practitioner of the Year Awards.”