Fund-raising drive: From left, Gavin Brown, Clint Taylor, Keely Tregillgas, Leanne Yates and Dayne Taylor at Springwood Baker’s Delight.
Buying a finger bun from Baker’s Delight in Springwood will do more than satisfy your tastebuds this week — it will also help provide much-needed doctors in rural Nepal.
Bakery owner Dayne Taylor is donating 100 per cent of the proceeds from the stores’s finger buns to the Nepal Health Scholarships charity until August 1. He hopes to raise $2000 which will help fund a medical student scholarship in the impoverished country.
Hazelbrook GP Louise McDonnell co-founded Nepal Health Scholarships in 2010 after discovering rural Nepal’s perilous medical situation while on a family holiday.
“While Nepal does produce enough doctors, half of them leave the country and the other half pretty much stay in Kathmandu,” she said.
“Out in the rural areas there’s a ratio of one doctor to 150,000 people, which is beyond belief.”
Nepal Health Scholarships is helping remedy this by funding scholarships at the Patan Academy of Health Sciences.
The academy offers full scholarships to nine of its 60 students and Nepal Health Scholarships aims to fund several of these positions.
It costs students about $10,000 each year for the five years training they require to qualify as a medical practitioner.
Along with her partner Alex Strachan, Dr McDonnell founded the charity with Professor Tim Usherwood of the Sydney Medical School and Professor Jenny Reath of the University of Western Sydney.
Mr Taylor started supporting the charity two years ago after reading about it in the Blue Mountains Gazette Review magazine. His first cheesymite scroll fund-raiser was so successful he decided to back it up with more support this year.
For more details about Nepal Health Scholarships, or to donate, vist www.nepalhealthscholarships.org.au.