As a medical student
interested in a future career working both domestically and internationally
with minority and underserved populations, this project means a lot to me. It’s
an opportunity for us to serve a patient population that is truly in dire need
of health care and public health measures. At the same time I believe that
we as students are gaining a very unique learning opportunity and experience unlike
any that we could find in the United States.
Some of the skills I
gained from the trip and hope that this year’s participants will also be
fortunate enough to learn include:
· Working
across a language barrier (not just Spanish which many of us are proficient at,
but Quechua, an indigenous language that is unrelated to any Latin language) and
cultural barriers (for example use of herbal remedies and the belief that evil
spirits are the cause of certain illnesses)
· Recognizing
illnesses such as parasitosis and nutritional deficiencies that are very
uncommon in the U.S. but may show up in U.S. clinics, especially in immigrants,
and are certainly important to be able to recognize.
· Leadership
– I was put into a leadership role (as were most of the students) as a first
year medical student and was in charge of managing a huge group of people, some
of who were my superiors in the medical field,. We really had to step up
to the plate. Apparently we did a decent job because one of this year’s
participants made a comment to us about how we could run a Fortune 500 company!
(Not true, but we were flattered nonetheless!)
· Seeing patients very efficiently so that we
could get through the line of sometimes over 200 patients in the village.
(Our clinic may have been the only opportunity for health care
that these patients would get that year!)
· History and Physical Exam skills - especially
with pediatric patients, who we rarely get to see in our first two years of
medical school
· And much, much more!
I’m really excited this year about the great improvements
including a push for increased sustainability with an emphasis on the Health
Education Conferences with local health care workers, much greater focus on
domestic violence and women’s health (both very important issues we saw),
research to learn more about our patients and how we can improve the project in
the future, and a push for using medications and protocols that are used by
Peruvian health care workers and by the WHO, to name just a few.
I’m very excited to
say that I will be able to return to Peru this year and get to witness
the
project growing and becoming more sustainable than ever
before. The new
leaders are doing a fantastic job, and I think this year’s trip is going
to be
better than ever. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for updates from
this year's leaders on our ongoing projects!
-Andrea Grosz
M2, CWRU School of Medicine
