Gus Bassani helps teach the art & science of pharmaceutical compounding for kids in need

The village sits on 88 acres of farmland and is comprised of three assisted living homes, which can house about 16 children each and a medical building.

“They call it the Gem Village,” Bassani said. “What’s beautiful about it, is they’re building it as a self-sustaining village with food and water supplies and the staff live there.”

Not only do the children benefit from the foundation’s work, but the surrounding community does, too, because of the access to clean water and jobs.

“You’d see kids with what looks like gas cans, but they were for water because now they have a community well to get high-quality water,” Bassani said.

The nonprofit’s staff includes nannies (who work in shifts around the clock), nurses, cooks, caretakers, physical therapists, occupational therapists, social workers, administration, security guards, drivers, farm managers and supervisors.

“Eventually they want a school,” Bassani shared. “It’s a community focused on giving kids hope, a future and they’re looking for families to adopt. It is a safe haven and has the resources to care for these kids in need.”

“The kids’ pure and genuine love even though they’ve been through so much,” is at the core of the Gem Foundation, said Josh Quisenberry in the provided video.

“They have a pure and faultless love that they willing give to those that they know love them.”

Since 2014, Bassani and his wife Beth have supported the Gem Foundation, but he wanted to visit Gem Village. “I knew I wanted to go there. It’s one thing to [support] from afar. I wanted to go to do whatever I could.”

As it happened, the company he works for found out about his intentions and wanted to help. Two PCCA colleagues, Daniel Banov, MS-R&D director, and Mark Gonzalez, Pharm.D.-Clinical consulting pharmacist, wanted to go with him as well.

“PCCA is a service minded type of company and it has something called PCCA Care Days,” Bassani said, explaining that the Fort Bend County Women’s Center is one of the local nonprofits that PCCA supports.

“When they found out I was going to Uganda the company assembled five bins and donated pharmaceutical materials and supplies.”

Included in those supplies were an electronic balance, compounding supplies, array of PCCA bases to help with oral suspensions and topical preparations.

THE OPPORTUNITY TO HELP

Before the prominent pharmaceutical manufacturers, patients went to the pharmacy to pick up their medication “where everything you got was compounded,” said Bassani, who is a pharmacist by training but works on the supply side PCCA and helps prepare specialized medications.

“The [pharmacist] would get the mortar and pestle and make the medicine — think old school apothecary.”

Pharmaceutical compounding, Bassani explained, is tailoring medication to meet a patient’s specific needs through combining, altering, or mixing ingredients.

“Think of it this way,” he said. “Sometimes a patient is allergic to a certain dye or filler, so you have to change an ingredient, or maybe you have a child who can’t swallow a pill. The medication can then be made into liquid form.”

That’s compounding, and it’s still taught, but it’s done today at an advanced level because there will always be patients who cannot be met by [typical] commercial means.”

And this knowledge is what Bassani and his colleagues took to Uganda this past July.

Emma said the foundation was grateful for the compounding knowledge because “a lot of our children are not able to eat well, they’re on feeding tubes [...] and it makes it really difficult when it comes to feeding or administering medicine [because] the children aren’t able to swallow due to GERD and other reflux issues.”

What the PCCA crew taught “makes a huge difference,” she said.

Bassani, Banov and Gonzalez stayed onsite in the Gem Village for 10 days, during which they toured the homes and learned about the children’s issues and which medications they were taking.

“We quickly saw opportunities for us to help them,” Bassani said, referring specifically to children who had tubes running down their noses to their stomachs.

Before learning pharmaceutical compounding, “they had to crush the pills,” Bassani said, describing the only way the medical staff could administer the medication at the time.

“But there is a potential loss of medication with that [method]. For example, a lot of the children are on an anti-seizure drug and administering [the dose] that way can cause a major issue. And the village is a good hour from a hospital.”

By teaching the medical staff pharmaceutical compounding, “we could help them give the accurate dosages,” Bassani said.

They provided the Gem nursing staff with three and a half days of training on preparing dosages — “mostly how to make a pill into a liquid,” he noted— and topical medications.

Day one consisted of reviewing compounding and the descriptions of the supplies, references and unique PCCA bases. On the second day, the PCCA staff educated the Gem staff on the importance and process of making compound suspensions and offered a lab where Gem staff compounded a 14-day supply of Baclofen suspension using commercially available tablets.

On the final day, the Gem staff learned about compounding topical agents and even developed a formula oral spray for children who suffer from excessive drooling.

The developed formula, made by the Gem staff, can now replace a commercially available tablet the foundation was previously purchasing. The new formula saves the nonprofit around $1,000 a month.

“We saw an immediate impact,” Bassani said.

But Bassani said he was influenced, too. Being at the Gem Village, conversing and listening to staff and the children, and experiencing the surrounding community was an eye-opener.

“This was the first time I had ever been to Africa and I’ve always wanted to go,” he said.

He recalls the initial shock of seeing the poverty in the areas he visited. 41 percent of the nearly 40 million people experience poverty and make less than two dollars a day.

“The things we take for granted,” he said. “The people who had nothing, they were joyful and thankful for what they do have.”

He said he is glad the Gem Village exists.

“To see how the lives of these kids were being impacted just through the Gem Foundation and meeting the 90 staff members who care for the kids, including people from the community working there... [the experience] shrinks the world,” Bassani said. “They’re so warm, loving and joyful. They’re giving [the children] an opportunity and the country and community are appreciative. The focus is the kids, that’s the mission, and you can see that.”

For more information about the Gem Foundation visit thegemfoundation.com