Saturday, July 13, 2013

Results! Fiesta!

Zac and Rachel, our medical student leaders, returned to El Corpus on Thursday from Tegucigalpa with the pap smear results. We convened on Thursday night to go over the results and follow-up plans for women in each community. We had about 365 patients, about 270 whom received pap smears, and of those that received pap smears there were 28 abnormal findings that ranged the spectrum of severity.

Yesterday we traveled to our respective communities to give back results. One of the health promoters will organize all the women that had abnormal results to go to Ashonplafa in Choluteca, our local partner. At Ashonplafa the women will receive biopsies and be counseled on what treatment is necessary following the biopsy results. We will provide the transportation and biopsy fees as we have done in the past.

We all had a great time spending a final afternoon with our host families in community. It was so pleasant to be able to return to our communities to say goodbye after developing a relationship with them during the first week. The MS2s on the trip will have an opportunity to return to the same communities as MS4s and thus our goodbye was possibly more of a ‘see you later.’

After packing up the clinic and reviewing pap results Thursday and returning results on Friday, we only have one more day of work before returning to the states. We will meet this afternoon to have an evaluation of HHA. This is HHAs 10th anniversary and thus we feel a particular responsibility to evaluate how our program has grown and how to effectively provide services in the future. Finally, we will have a fiesta to celebrate our hard work!

This trip would not have been possible without the generous donation of family members, friends, physicians, alumni, and the medical school. We are grateful to be part of such a legacy of UNC medical students and faculty that have gone before us. We are excited to pass the torch for those returning next year.


¡Hasta en los Estados Unidos!

Christina and her host family.

Typical homestay.

Des organizing clinic breakdown.

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