Non Profit Medicine

 80% of the population of  El Salvador lives without health insurance, leaving public hospitals and clinics to provide  health care.  Unfortunately, most of the facilities are severely underfunded.  There are only eight intensive care beds in the country’s main public hospital,  Hospital Rosales,  not nearly enough to serve the sickest of the country’s seven million people.  Physicians are paid so little by the government that some choose to be taxi drivers rather than work in public clinics, while others work only a few hours per day, moonlighting in the more lucrative private clinics available only to the country’s richest ten percent.

     Dr. Daniella Flamenco is one of a growing number of physicians employed by international non-profit organizations.  She and her three partners (a psychologist,  a dentist, and a woman’s health specialist) are given funding and medicines to treat the country’s poorest patients.  Each morning they take a pick-up truck to distant tiny rural communities where physicians are not generally available and, for the equivalent of one dollar per person,  provide  primary care and free medicine to as many patients as the day allows.
I recently accompanied Dr. Flamenco, along with three other medical students from the Mayo Clinic, to El Salvador as an aid.  We helped her treat patients, provided her with as many additional medical supplies as we could fit in our travel bags,  and gave the psychologist a number of donated children’s books to use in his practice. He uses these books to help his youngest patients express their feelings through story telling.  We assisted generally in any way we could.

    Due to the civil war which plagued El Salvador in the 1980's and 90's, psychological health is one of many overlooked problems. Adults live with post traumatic stress syndrome due to violent incidents during the war. Children suffer from depression because their parents have been forced to immigrate to the U.S. or Mexico to earn cash, while they are left to live with distant family members. There are many problems, and Dr. Flamenco's patients represent  only a lucky few receiving the vital treatment she and her colleagues provide.

    Part of our trip involved volunteering in El Salvador’s main public children’s hospital, Hospital Bloom. Though relatively small by U.S. standards, it serves El Salvador’s youngest and sickest.  Private rooms are unheard of here.  The ICU consists of crowded, loud, rows of cribs divided by beeping respirators and heart monitors. Visiting hours are restricted from 1-3 pm, so the air is often filled with the cries of lonely children. Nurses and physicians do their best to comfort them, but are often overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.  We were able to donate over fifty children’s books creating the beginnings of a small library for the hospital’s oncology unit.

    The most memorable and heart wrenching  patient was a twelve year old girl who had been in the post-surgical room (a communal recovery room for post-surgical patients) since December 2008.  She had been shot twice in the neck by local gangs, which are notoriously violent and responsible for most of the current bloodshed and crime in the country.  Although she survived, the bullets severed her spinal cord and she was paralyzed permanently from the neck down.  Physicians are currently trying to wean her off the respirator, but in a country where the only available public hospice care is family care, her prognosis is bleak.

    Halfway through our trip we were joined by additional physicians and medical students from the Mayo Clinic.  We volunteered to treat patients in two urban clinics in San Salvador -- San Jacinto and San Marcos -- as well as set up a two day “medical campaign” in which we treated over three hundred patients from rural communities.  One sixty year-old woman reported that she had never before visited a physician in her life. She  waited patiently for over an hour in the humid, 95 degree heat of our make shift, concrete clinic to see one of the doctors.

    Our small yet committed group proved to me that there remains hope for the the long term health and care of the people of El Salvador.  Dr. Flamenco sets a shining example, working tirelessly out of love for country and her countrymen.  She and her Colleagues offer an invaluable service but they need help.  The Mayo Clinic has been instrumental in this regard.  Mayo's Dr. Steven Adamson was responsible for bringing the very first X-ray machine to a public hospital in Honduras and now works to get new medical technology to hospitals in El Salvador.  Dr.  John Wilson, from Mayo's division of infectious diseases,  currently works with Hospital Rosales exchanging information, technology, and providing aid.  I was proud to be a part of this wonderful endeavor and will forever be touched by the thanks we received from those we were able to assist.

By:  Erin (lindsay) Lough
OLA Username: llough

Online Adventure Congratulates Erin (Lindsay) Lough for her selfless efforts and would also like to offer thanks to some of those other people, organizations, and businesses which helped out.

Students and family of Madame Pinaire’s classroom at Normandale Elementary, Wild Rumpus Books, Magers and Quinn Book Sellers, the Salvation Army, Minnesota Princeton University Alumni, Mayo Clinic, friends and family of Chaitanya Pabbati, family of Beth Angstman, and family of Ankaj Khosla.