My experience volunteering abroad with Volunteers Around the World in Panama during May of 2017 has been the best experience of my life thus far! I am genuinely even more sure that I want to pursue a future in medicine because of the lessons that I have learned about the healthcare system and patient care.
I volunteered as a part of a team of about 20 students to set up and run mobile clinics on various islands. To best organize ourselves, we had a chain of command where we reported up to those who were chosen to be leaders. I learned that I had to know my place in this team. This was my first trip as a member of that organization, so I was not in a leadership position. I had to be flexible because we were working around things like the weather, or medication shortages, or broken medical equipment. When things went wrong, we had to rely on each other to organize the patients. I learned to communicate effectively and respectfully, maintain confidentiality, delegate tasks, lean on my team and those leaders for help, and to offer help where I could.
I also learned so much about medicine! While in clinics, we spent time filling out intake forms, taking vitals, shadowing doctors, and working in a pharmacy. While taking vitals and shadowing doctors, we had the opportunity to learn how to examine patients, learn about certain illnesses and how to distinguish them from others, and learn about the medications we had available and their common dosages.
In mobile clinics, one struggle that we ran into was that many of our patients were uncomfortable with what they called “charity” and downplayed their symptoms in order to keep distance between us. This distance was only increased by language and culture barriers. Many of us were taught enough Spanish to complete our tasks, but not enough to converse freely. Luckily, the doctors we worked with spoke both English and Spanish, and I was able to utilize them to learn how to communicate with patients. Talking about patient’s lives and interests often made them comfortable enough to open up to us about their real health problems and allowed us to more-accurately take their medical histories and fill out intake forms. This allowed our doctors to treat them much more effectively. This experience will make me a stronger doctor because I have learned how to communicate not only to do my job, but also to connect with others.