MEDRIX Programs
Two MEDRIX programs saving lives and improving the quality of life in Vietnam are our heart surgery sponsorships and safe water development.
Heart Surgery Sponsorships
Thousands of children in Vietnam younger than five-years-old suffer from heart disease and up to 90% do not have access to the care they need. With labored breathing and lack of energy, many boys and girls struggle to take their next breath.
MEDRIX sponsors heart surgeries for children in Vietnam when their family can’t afford the medical expenses. As an organization working to save and improve lives, we believe in providing disadvantaged families and children with hope for a healthy future.
We partner with organizations and surgeons in Vietnam to assure these children will receive the best of care for successful surgery with the best possible outcomes.
Safe Water Development
MEDRIX found a common trend across Vietnam: a lack of safe water severely impacts the quality of health throughout Vietnam. Providing access to safe water will help solve many health problems.
Children are particularly affected by unsafe drinking water, which causes diarrhea-related diseases, E. coli, human viral hand, foot and mouth disease and other epidemic illnesses.
To combat these epidemics, MEDRIX partners with Vietnam’s Public Health Agency to ensure that schools, health clinics and hospitals have hand washing stations and safe drinking water, free from disease-causing organisms and harmful chemicals.
We have installed more than 60 ultraviolet water treatment systems. Moreover, we train and educate local community members to maintain their own systems and ensure safe water sustainability.
Recent Successes and Current Challenges
One of our latest success stories has been providing six Vietnamese children with heart surgery in February and March through MEDRIX partner sponsorship. These procedures make a lifetime’s difference.
MEDRIX sponsors children’s heart surgery for families who cannot afford the medical costs. Without surgery, these boys and girls would have listless childhoods, without the strength to go to school regularly or to play with other kids. Children like these are often identified as weak, unable to support a family’s future and not worth any great investment.
However, the mothers and fathers of these six children carried them many miles – with scarce little money and one man without the shirt on his back – to ask MEDRIX to sponsor each child’s heart surgery.
Thanks to our donors, not one child was turned down. All six boys and girls received surgery and are now on the mend with the hope of healthy childhoods ahead of them.
This success comes in the midst of our greatest need: to treat childhood illness in developing Vietnam.
Children in Vietnam are susceptible to many infectious diseases, such as congenital rubella - which results in retina abnormalities, heart problems and retardation - and diarrhea-related illnesses.
It is reported that 80% of children who die in Vietnam succumb to diarrhea-related diseases, often resulting from unsafe drinking water and lack of hygiene education. This is why MEDRIX partners with local communities to create access to safe drinking water; we train Vietnamese health practitioners to educate mothers about health and nutrition during pregnancy, and to teach children good hygiene practices.
We are dedicated to combating childhood illnesses in Vietnam!