Miss DC Contestant Sarah Hillware shares her experiences from her recent trip to Ecuador to volunteer with MEDLIFE. She is pictured above with a boy whose mother came in to see the gynecologist. Her Miss DC platform this year was Health Leads DC: Better Health – One Connection at a Time She currently attends George Washington University.
When I first heard about the MEDLIFE medical brigades, I had a few expectations in mind, some of which were met and some of which were not. Many people think of the term “medical mission” and instantaneously think of foreign healthcare professionals and underqualified student volunteers providing nothing but short-term, low-quality services with no real intention of following up with the patients. I had spent months prior to going on this brigade recruiting students, researching various global health models, and trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together to get a clear picture of what exactly MEDLIFE was all about. Interning for a well-known global health and development organization before going on the brigade helped me get a sense of how urgent the need is for accessible primary care, but I still hadn’t had a chance to do any work on the ground. MEDLIFE allowed me to do this.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that all of the physicians hired by MEDLIFE are Ecuadorian and many could speak both the indigenous language as well as Spanish. They also all happened to be women, which was fitting for one of the prevalent issues at hand in the Chimborazo area, which is maternal health. MEDLIFE also has a designated person in charge of patient follow-up, which is a rarity in the tradition of medical missions. MEDLIFE’s medical brigades truly are more than just a mission, but a real, sustainable way to ensure that the communities in which we foster relations are not left in the dust when the volunteers leave.
On each MEDLIFE brigade, there are 7 stations: health education, toothbrushing, dentistry, vitals, primary care doctor, gynecologist and the pharmacy. Usually, there are aboiut 2 – 3 student volunteers per station. The first day of the week of brigades, we took a bus to a village about 3 hours away. The community leaders gathered everyone from the local school and made an announcement about our presence and it went smoothly from there – we saw about 150 patients total. I worked in the gynecology station, holding tools, comforting nervous patients, and translating from English to Spanish. The people seemed like they were unsure of what was coming next at times, but still put full trust in the MEDLIFE staff and volunteers to give them the correct information about their welfare, which was humbling. At the end of the work day, we were all invited to the home of one of our patients to eat a three-course lunch – that was definitely the best part of that day. It is always wonderful to be able to bond with the community on a personal level.
Day 2 was a little less hectic. We saw about 80 – 100 patients and there was a nice workflow because we all had a sense of how everything worked by then. That day, until about noon, I had the opportunity to play with children at the toothbrushing station and have lengthy one-on-one conversations with the locals. They love to ask questions of all kinds! I was even asked to sing a song in English and completely embarrassed myself by satisfying that request. Later in the day, I went to help control the crowd at the primary care station. Many of the issues were geriatric in nature in this community, whereas on the first day, there was a greater need for maternal and child health care.
What I’ve observed time and time again is that healthcare is more than the actual treatment – it is the quality of the interaction between provider and patient, the follow-up after a visit, the smiles, the careful listening and most importantly, the sense of reliability.
¡Salud!
Sarah
