Guyana

Guyana is a small South American country of 780,000 people located next to Venezuela. Roughly 43% of Guyana’s population lives below the poverty line. There are only 2.14 physicians per 10,000 people in Guyana, compared with 24 per 10,000 in the US.

With over 50,000 disabled people in Guyana, there is only one facility in the entire country providing prosthetic and orthotic devices and physical rehabilitation, the Ptolemy Reid Rehabilitation Center. The center is a non-governmental non-profit organization struggling to provide care to the large indigent disabled population. Challenges include funding for prosthetic components and maintaining the training levels of prosthetists, orthotists, technicians, and therapists. The center employs a dedicated staff of physiotherapists and prosthetic and orthopedic technicians. However, there are no schools in Guyana for formal technical training in prosthetics and orthotics.

Since 2018, ProsthetiKa has been assisting disabled people in Guyana by providing technical training and support at the Ptolemy Reid Rehabilitation Center.

Our first project in Guyana:

In April 2018, we sent a team consisting of a prosthetist, an orthotist, a physiotherapist, and a patient peer support advocate (himself an amputee) to assess the center’s needs and capabilities. We met with staff members and disabled people in the community to get input on what is needed and how we might work together to make improvements. While there, we immediately got to work hand in hand with local technicians to fit people with prosthetic arms and legs and orthopedic braces. In this way, patients were being served while local staff were being trained. This is the way to build local capacity and ensure sustainability. The scope and size of the first project were modest, but it demonstrated that we could work together and begin to make the improvements so sorely needed.

The project exceeded all expectations, and plans were immediately made for follow-up with more intensive training and fittings of the most challenging levels of need.

Our second project in Guyana:

Two months later, ProsthetiKa was contacted again by Ptolemy Reid Rehabilitation Center, which asked us to immediately provide another, more intensive training project. This time, the project was to be twice as long, servicing many more disabled people, narrowing the scope, but increasing the depth of training. The team returned in August to provide an intensive prosthetics workshop. This ProsthetiKa team consisted of Jon Batzdorff, CPO of California, USA; Laura Burgess, PT of London, England; and Eddy Fuentes, CPO of Guatemala City, Guatemala. Pan American Health Organization, a department of the World Health Organization, offered support for the project, providing funding and prosthetic components for 25 arm and leg amputees. ProsthetiKa provided the training required to use these components to custom-make prosthetic limbs and to provide physical therapy to amputees, training them to walk or use their artificial arms.

Again, the project was very successful. It concluded with a presentation of the results of our work at a reception attended by all the disabled people who were part of the project and all the trainees. The Hon. Volda Lawrence, Minister of Health of Guyana, and Dr. William Adu-Krow, Country Director of Pan American Health Organization, attended and addressed the group.

Continuing Assistance in Guyana

In February 2025, ProsthetiKa conducted its sixth intensive prosthetic and orthotic fitting and training program in Georgetown, Guyana, at the Ptolemy Reid Rehabilitation Center. As always, our goal is to combine patient service with building local capacity. The goal of the project was to introduce advanced prosthetic solutions that could improve outcomes using available and appropriate components.

Costs and logistics were shared between ProsthetiKa, World Rehabilitation Fund, and the Guyanese Ministry of Health.

In 2025, the team fitted 14 lower-limb prostheses and 1 myoelectric upper-limb prosthesis. Visiting ProsthetiKa experts worked side by side with their Guyanese counterparts in all patient work. All patients were successfully fit, and the team was asked to return in 2026 to continue training while helping to fit an additional 20 people.