The Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC) is a paediatric NGO-funded teaching hospital in Siem Reap, northwest Cambodia. The city has a population of 140,000 people and is the fastest growing city in the country, a direct result of a boom in tourism with more than 2000 people arriving each day to visit the Angkor Wat temples. The AHC is a clinical training site for doctors, and for nursing students from all five of Cambodia’s regional training centers. The hospital is also a training site for the WHO-developed Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) training programme. The AHC provides outpatient, inpatient, emergency, surgical, medical, ophthalmological and dental care. The outpatient department currently sees up to 400 children each day, and the hospital maintains 50 inpatient beds spread across high, medium and low intensity care areas.

A collaboration was set up between the AHC and MORU in 2007. The first step in this collaboration involved the equipping of the hospital microbiological laboratory and the training of technical staff, all of which is now in place and fully operational. This has already provided insights into the leading causes of bacterial sepsis in this population. We will now use this facility to prospectively define the causes of febrile illness and establish susceptibility patterns of common culturable bacterial pathogens. These data will also allow us to identify causes of sepsis and sepsis-related death, and will facilitate the development of rational approaches to the diagnosis, treatment and management of paediatric infections at the AHC and other similar institutions in Cambodia.

You can visit the AHC's website at: www.angkorhospital.org