More than 500 patients served in joint Lipscomb/Belmont mission trip
Partnerships provides medications and expertise for Jovenes en Camino to provide health care to more rural communities in Honduras.
Janel Shoun-Smith | 615.966.7078 |
Lipscomb College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences Dean Roger Davis (left); Sarah Catherine Teixeira, executive director of Jovenes en Camino, and David Gregory, dean of the Belmont University College of Pharmacy, commemorate the partnership to provide volunteer health care to communities in Honduras.
More than 500 patients were served in Honduras through a first-of-its-kind December joint mission trip by Lipscomb and Belmont universities to Jovenes en Camino, a boys’ home in Honduras where the colleges helped fund construction of a pharmacy.
In January 2019, the two Colleges of Pharmacy solidified a deal to provide funding for the pharmacy building and to send four interprofessional medical teams a year to Jovenes, which opened a clinic in 2018 to serve the community beyond the Jovenes campus.
The first joint mission team set out this past December with 24 members from the nursing, physician assistant, pharmacy and pre-pharmacy disciplines. Thirteen Lipscomb students and faculty joined 11 Belmont students and employees.
The mission team spent time with the children at the boy's home, as well as providing care to the community.
The team worked five days at the boys’ home itself but spent the rest of the time conducting mobile clinics throughout the area along with a Honduran physician.
“In Honduras, patients travel miles and miles on foot to get to these clinics that we set up,” said Grace Mason, a junior nursing major at Lipscomb from Hendersonville, Tennessee. “Overall, any patient I saw I was touched by them due to their willingness to wait hours and hours and how grateful they were for us to be there.”
While Jovenes, a Nashville-based nonprofit, had committed to bless more people in its community through the clinic, which is open two days a week, the organization was only able to coordinate one mobile clinic a year prior to the start of the Lipscomb/Belmont mission team commitment, said Sarah Catherine Teixeira, Jovenes executive director.
The colleges’ mission teams will allow patients in the rural areas to obtain health care four times a year, bringing a greater continuity of care to those communities, she said.
The Jovenes pharmacy building, now constructed, provides a space for storage and better organization of medications, allowing them to be used more effectively, while freeing up space in the clinic for patient care, said Teixeira.
Lipscomb’s mission funds also allow Jovenes to purchase medications needed for the mobile clinics during the team visit and to be left at the clinic for the future, said Jessica Wallace, Lipscomb assistant professor of pharmacy practice and team leader.
The first joint mission team set out this past December with 24 members, 13 from Lipscomb and 11 from Belmont, from the nursing, physician assistant, pharmacy and pre-pharmacy disciplines.
Frequent rivals join forces
While Lipscomb and Belmont (located just down the road from Lipscomb) have a healthy rivalry on the athletic fields, the medical mission teams quickly became a unified whole, despite having only first met in the airport on the way out of Nashville, said team members.
Elisa Greene, Belmont associate professor of pharmacy practice and one of the team leaders, arrived on the trip one day late, and “by the time I got there, they were all acting cohesively and acting like they had known each other forever.
“We all realized we were there for the same reason,” said Brent Thompson, Lipscomb assistant professor of pharmacy practice and team leader.
“Outside of getting to serve and interact with the Honduran people, the collaboration between different disciplines and colleges was my favorite part of this trip,” said Laura Cherry, Lipscomb P3 student pharmacist from Somerset, Kentucky. “It was so valuable to me to see up close and personal how nurses, physician assistants and even other pharmacy students are trained. My knowledge base was certainly expanded due to the expertise of the other students and health care professionals on the trip.”
The team brought medications out into the community, setting up a pharmacy distribution system at each mobile clinic.
Team drew from various health care professions
In addition to coming from different universities, the students came from different health disciplines, by design. Lipscomb’s College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences is working to integrate all of its mission trip opportunities among its health science programs, said Ginger Saunders, coordinator of mission and community outreach. The college hosts four to five medical mission trips each year, she said.
International mission work certainly serves to reinforce the interprofessional curriculum and training at Lipscomb, said Wallace, who marked her seventh medical mission trip with this team.
“The interprofessional experience is something we focus on here, but on a mission trip, you are thrown together and you really must work together because the stakes are high for the patient. You quickly start to value other people’s roles. It’s great to utilize different people’s skill sets,” she said.
The mission team members were divided into two groups with a good mix of Belmont and Lipscomb students and differing health specialties in each group to work in the mobile clinics. In the health care industry, professionals have to work with each other no matter where they graduated from, Wallace pointed out.
“Each discipline brought their expertise to the table and were very forthcoming in helping others where they lacked certain skills,” said Emerald Lupari, a Belmont P2 student pharmacist from Germantown, Maryland. “Together, as a whole, we were able to communicate and work together effectively to serve the different communities within Honduras.”
The team went out in to the rural communities surrounding Jovenes to provide health care at sites like this one.
Mission work changes a mindset
For all health profession students, medical mission trips to disadvantaged communities help them solidify their skills while working in a high pressure, low resource environment, skills that will serve them well in the U.S. health care system as well, said leaders at the colleges.
“They learn a lot about teamwork, about flexibility and resilience,” said Greene. “They learn about the lens through which we see the world and how that effects outcomes and behaviors. It helps them put things in perspective, so they won’t make assumptions.”
According to student team members, they cared for patients medically and spiritually including a woman with untreated diabetes and high blood pressure, a cancer patient who needed palliative care, a woman with a broken arm who had no cast and no sling and patients suffering from grief and loss, as well as providing over the counter agents for future use.
The visit by the Belmont and Lipscomb teams allowed Jovenes to serve more communities in more rural areas.
“This trip changed my mindset on putting myself in patient’s shoes,” said Mason. “Walking miles, standing in the heat and waiting hours and hours, these patients went through a ton just to get low-grade pain or cold medications.”
Lipscomb had previously taken medical mission teams to Jovenes in the past few years, but this December was Belmont’s first time at the location, said Larkin Briley, Belmont director of missions and the fourth team leader. Belmont typically hosts three to four interprofessional health science missions trips a year to Guatemala, Cambodia, Tanzania and now Honduras.
“This trip fits in well with what we are trying to do: to equip students for long-term participation on God’s mission. It’s a great partnership for us to develop,” said Briley.
Jovenes en Camino, originally established by Lipscomb Associate Dean of Spiritual Formation Steve Davidson, operates a children's home and school for orphan boys of all ages in El Zamorano, Honduras. Both Lipscomb and Belmont have personal connections to the staff and supporters of the charity.