Students Travel to Honduras on Medical Mission with Global Medical Brigades

Newly established University of Maryland, Baltimore chapter of Global Medical Brigades sends an interdisciplinary team of 25 students to help improve the quality of life for under-served locals.

By Melissa Kim
February 2, 2011

On January 2, student volunteers from nearly every professional school at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) traveled to Tegucigalpa, Honduras for a week long medical mission trip. During the week, students from the campus’s pharmacy, law, nursing, dental, social work, and graduate schools provided medical and dental care to more than 1,600 Honduran men, women, and children.

Fourth-year student pharmacist William Albanese coordinated the trip with the vision of bringing an interdisciplinary health care team to the people of Honduras. In the summer of 2010, Albanese traveled to Honduras with a group of undergraduate students from Pennsylvania State University and knew the project would be a good fit for the UMB campus.

Thanks to the generous support of EPIC Pharmacies, Tinsley Bible Drug Co., Professional Pharmacy, the School of Pharmacy, and several other sponsors, the group was able to bring 25 suitcases full of medications, medical and dental supplies, and hygiene products to some of the poorest, isolated areas in Honduras. With a family income of less than $2 per day, locals often go without food, and families do not have the luxury of clean water to drink or soap to stay clean. The UMB students were able to serve the communities of La Cienega, San Diego Sul, and Manzaragua where, with virtually no access to health care, families hiked anywhere from one to three hours to the clinic desperate for medical attention.

At the clinic, patients rotated through five different stations: triage, medical, dental, pharmacy, and charlas (“talks”). The set up of the clinic allowed for a more integrated, interdisciplinary approach towards health care, where the physicians diagnosed the patients and the pharmacists used their expertise to treat the diagnoses, often needing to think creatively with the limited supplies available. The clinical team also screened patients for hypertension, pulled 113 diseased teeth, dispensed over 55,000 multivitamins, and 10 soccer balls to the local children. During the “talks,” the students stressed the importance of good hygiene and taught almost 100 children how to brush their teeth, distributing 1,200 toothbrushes with toothpaste, and 1,500 shampoo and soap packets to the local families.

In addition to the clinical experience, this brigade also provided the unique opportunity for students of different disciplines to work side-by-side and learn from each other. “Because students had the chance to rotate through the various stations, there were pharmacy students working in dental helping with tooth extractions, students from social work interviewing patients alongside nursing students in triage, and law students working in the pharmacy,” says Albanese. “Needless to say, this was a life-changing and memorable experience. It also left all the Brigaders itching to go back, wanting to do more and give more to the people of Honduras.”