The Script: Teaming up for good

Janel Shoun-Smith | 04/05/2018

Interprofessional teams thrive on international mission opportunities

To see a photo album of missions photos click here.

To see a personal reflection from Sarah Uroza click here.

This past summer, an unconscious woman was carried into an emergency room. She was nonresponsive and convulsing. Although on break, the on-site health care workers jumped into action and calmly treated the woman, who was at high risk for a stroke, lowering her blood pressure until she could walk and talk on her own.

It’s an event that likely happens every day in emergency rooms around the nation. But on this day, this woman was in Haiti, and she had walked five miles to come to the clinic, staffed that week by health science students from Lipscomb University.

And on this day, the pharmacy, nursing and kinesiology students and professors at the clinic had no emergency medication or IV bags. They all worked together to treat her with aspirin and blood pressure medication.

Afterwards, a local minister shook every clinic worker’s hand saying that he had watched a miracle happen before his eyes.

Such events, as described by nursing instructor Jennifer Weber, are not uncommon on medical mission trips to underserved nations. And they are exactly the kind of emergency that future health care workers need to experience during their training.

For the past seven years, Lipscomb students from various health science disciplines have joined together in interprofessional teams to travel to Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Malawi, Peru, Guatemala, Zambia, Appalachia and the Florida Panhandle to provide service for well over 6,000 patients.

Such trips not only nurture valuable innovative thinking and teamwork skills, but they also provide students a chance to live out their faith in their chosen health care profession.

In July 2017, kinesiology Professor Lynn Griffith led a trip to Haiti (where he has traveled 37 times since 2002) which included pharmacy and nursing faculty and students. In the village of Cadouche, near the city of Cap Haitien, the team staffed a medical clinic, another group repaired a community basketball court, and a Lipscomb education professor along with other educators conducted teacher training workshops at a nearby school.

2017 was the third year a Lipscomb team has traveled to Cadouche, and the health sciences professors and students had the operation of the clinic running like clockwork, Griffith said.

The clinic in Cadouche has no air conditioning and no electricity, but the interprofessional team saw 380 patients in four days, assessing each one using the most basic equipment, said Weber, who has coordinated the clinic for two years.

“Health care cannot be accomplished without an interdisciplinary team in any setting,” said Weber. “The fact that our mission teams are interdisciplinary, is just preparing our students to go out into the working world.

“By working in these close quarters, in these trying conditions, they learn what each discipline does and learn to respect what each other does, because each skill set is necessary for good care to a patient,” Weber said. “By learning that now, it will help them show respect to the other providers around them in the professional world.”

Freda Fuller, assistant professor in nursing, led an interprofessional team to work in Blessings Hospital in Malawi, Africa, this past summer.

The Blessings Hospital is partially supported by the Sarah Walker Foundation, a Nashville-based foundation that funds medical mission trips for physicians and Lipscomb health science students to work in the hospital. During the first two weeks of the Malawi mission trip, Lipscomb student nurses work with the visiting physicians to cycle through various areas of the hospital: admissions, the operating room, pre-op and post-op while Lipscomb pharmacy students run the hospital’s pharmacy functions.

After the surgical week, students can opt to stay another two weeks to participate in mobile clinics set up in churches and schools in remote villages. Students learn to deal with obstacles such as labor shortages, lack of medical supplies and power and water outages, Fuller said. Pharmacy students in particular get experience working hands-on, without the automated systems common in America, Fuller said.

“We work in silos in American hospitals, without the opportunity to see or experience what other types of health professionals do. Students can experience a lot of things on a mission trip that they would never get a chance to do in the U.S., such as assist a mother giving birth,” said Fuller.

“In a place like Malawi with very few nurses, Malawian nursing students manage multiple deliveries and are grateful to have assistance from American students. In the U.S., some student nurses don’t even get the chance to see a delivery before they graduate. This past summer, one of our students did 50 pre-natal assessments, and the Malawi health care workers were so thankful to have someone who could do it.”

During the 2016 Lipscomb mission trip to Malawi a baby was born at Blessings who was not breathing and needed resuscitation. After several minutes of intervention, the baby began to breathe alone. On the 2017 trip, the grateful family brought the healthy one-year old baby back for a visit, Fuller said.

“In 2016 our team performed a myomectomy on a patient with fibroid tumors in her uterus. Because of the tumors she had been unable to get pregnant, which is grounds for divorce in the Malawian culture. In 2017 she was at Blessings hospital to deliver a baby,” Fuller said.

“We get to see a lot of cool re-affirmation that what we do in Malawi matters in the lives of people,” summed up Fuller.

In 2018, the School of Nursing plans to add a trip to Guatemala and Griffith plans to involve more College of Education faculty and students along with health science students on his annual trip to Haiti.

To learn more about the College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences click here.