The Faith to Serve
Saw Moo Kler Taw was one of ten students selected for our very first class of EM Physician Associates in 2016. After finishing the five-year program at the end of 2020, he quickly went home to his district in Northern Karen State alongside two of our other graduates from the same area to start Taw Oo Secondary Care Clinic.
He visited our headquarters office in Chiang Mai this year in September and presented to us the story of their clinic: how it started and how it had blossomed in the past 3 and a half years. They started small in January of 2021 but soon met with catastrophic demands with the chaos following the February 2021 coup and then COVID-19 which swept through Myanmar at once in June of 2021.
Though he has struggled with a lack of supplies, staff, and finances, he took it upon himself to develop the needed healthcare system from scratch. He hired healthcare providers he knew personally, applied for grants, and studied public health and hospital management theory. Now, Moo Kler Taw is the clinic director with 46 staff, including primary and secondary care doctors, surgeons, the public health field team, nurses, training coordinators, and hospital finance and administration teams.
Taw Oo Secondary Care Clinic is a secondary healthcare center, which means that because it has surgical capacity, medicine, doctors, and PAs, primary clinics refer patients from villages in large areas. Six village tract health clinics (VTHCs), each taking care of a cluster of villages, often see patients first and then send them to Taw Oo Secondary Care Clinic if they need a higher level of care.
In the first nine months of this year, the hospital has taken care of 7,200 OPD patients, and 1,080 IPD patients. Many, many more people have been the beneficiaries of public health programs like vaccinations and community health programs provided by Moo Kler Taw’s staff and students.
We at Earth Mission (EM) are very proud of Moo Kler Taw and his talent for building a health care facility of this magnitude. When we started the PA program, we knew that our graduates would have an incredible responsibility before them: they would be the highest-level medical professionals locally trained. This means that they would have to care for patients when no one else could. They would also be put in leadership positions that demanded creative thinking, resourcefulness, and the ability to manage staff and create systems for finance and supply.
There is no way that one program can teach all of these areas of expertise, but we try to improve our training program all the time to include as many of these leadership skills as possible. Suggestions from graduates like Moo Kler Taw are valuable feedback for us in the EM education department. We at EM and our graduates know that it takes great faith to serve people when we fear the needs may be beyond the help we can offer. Stories of success like this give us the much-needed courage to keep moving forward.
Multiply Moo Kler Taw’s Impact
Moo Kler Taw’s achievements are a direct result of your investment—and show the ripple effect our students are making throughout Karen State.
As 2024 comes to an end, consider investing in a future leader! Your family, church, or business can sponsor a student like Moo Kler Taw to multiply access to life-saving healthcare.
A generous donor has given $36,000 to sponsor 6 students. Would you match their generosity before the year ends?
Click the link below to learn how to become a Student Sponsor.
