How this all began

How the Aberdeen team got started, we are mostly medical students who were members of a student led society in Aberdeen called the Wilderness Medicine Society, this is a group interested in all areas of medicine not taught traditionally in the medical school, things like pre-hospital care and expedition medicine.

A couple of the original members became interested in Guyana after going there on a training course and suggested an expedition to the rest of the group. As more people became involved we started trying to find out more about Guyana and soon became absolutely fascinated.

However we quickly became frustrated with how little we were able to find out, aside from a couple of useful websites, a wildlife documentary series and a few youtube channels the library had only one book (an older guidebook) with any information about Guyana in it. Furthermore we were shocked and saddened to learn how little medical research has been carried out in Guyana despite the diversity and opportunity present, the importance of evidence to guide policy and healthcare provision is something that has been drummed into us and so we became ever more keen to design a project that would address this.

We also knew that if we were going to run research, it could not be what was once called a 'parachute project' where a whole load of foreign researchers go into a country with less resources, study the people and then bugger off not having

A)asked the participants what they wanted or needed and

B) not having had any lasting impact.

So we wanted to ensure maximum involvement with local scientists, students and communities in Guyana, we sent out a lot of emails we asked what would be most useful? how could the facilities we have in Aberdeen be useful to you? Unfortunately, we did not get any replies... So we had to start planning ourselves, we had a look at some of the WHO and PAHO documents which laid out the research priorities for the South Americas, the most important questions they said, were things like what is access to healthcare like? and how is economic growth affecting people's health?

We thought that some of these questions were things we might be able to answer, we could measure variables like BMI and blood pressure without needing lots of expensive equipment. We also became interested the Amerindian population, as in other cultures worldwide it is the indigenous populations who are worst affected by westernisation, was this happening in Guyana? We then had some replies from Guyana, we talked to the Embassy in London, and got verbal support from the High Commission, we started talking to groups working in the Interior and discovered some of the things we were thinking about looking at (eg dental health) would be unacceptable and impractical, so we changed some bits and bobs and started on writing the proposal in earnest.