Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Two clinic days down!

I apologize for the tardiness of this blog post! Internet (and power) is sometimes hit or miss in our homestay town of El Corpus.

Sunday afternoon, all of the students returned from their 4 day stays in the community where we all delivered our charlas. We had audiences of 30 to 160 women at the charlas, depending on the size of the community. Per HHA rules, a woman must attend at least two charlas in order to guarantee a spot at clinic on their community clinic day (though we have never had to turn away patients in the past). After debriefing Sunday night, we found that our patient population was incredibly receptive to our talks, and had a better understanding of our services and mission as an organization, as well as health resources they have access to in their area. Olivia Myrick and Tara Lane (MS4 trip leaders) also expanded HHA services to a brand new community this year! Continually, our three Family Medicine physicians (Drs. Rupal Yu, Narges Farahi, and Morgan McEachern) joined us Sunday night in El Corpus.

Clinic Monday was a lighter day (60 women!) and gave the MS4s and opportunity to teach the MS2s in the clinic. MS2 and MS4 duos would interview a patient together, etablish a plan, present the patient to an attending physician, and continue the patient encounter from there. The second year medical students are in charge of all physical exams while the attending and fourth year medical student advise and assist. It has been an incredible opportunity for the medical students as the MS2s essentially fill the role of an ´´intern´´ with a supervising MS4 ´´resident´´. The learning curve was huge the first day, but was equally as exciting.

Today, we left El Corpus at 6 am for clinic and saw 92 women from the Guanacaste community in clinic. It is suggested that women receive a Pap year every 2 years after the age of 21 (or every year in the case of abnormal results). We performed 51 Paps today!

Tomorrow and Friday we are expecting close to a 100 women each day, with slightly less busy days Thursday and Saturday before we send all results off to the family planning center (ASHONPLAFA) to be read.

I will try to post about clinic every day this week that we have Internet! For now, I am going to go join everyone for a much anticipated cerveza.

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