Sometimes it feels like you are sticking a finger in the dike

Today was another day of outreach into a community school. We were a scaled down team of providers that worked out of the Maria Madre Clinic in Alto Cayma. In just over 5 hours were attended over 140 children – many suffering from malnutrition, advanced peri-oral disease and respiratory tract infections.

The amazing part of working in Alto Cayma is the opportunity for longitudinal care. As our clinic outreach efforts are merely extensions of the on-going work that Father Alex’s clinic provides in the community – our efforts are closely tied to a bigger mission which is to change the plight of poverty in this vast peri-urban settlement.

The number of children seen in the outreach with significant malnourishment was astounding. It seemed like ever other child was classified as falling below the 5th percentile for weight, height and age matched indicators. Our response to this issue is to develop a program that sends a social worker into the homes of the highest need families and works to identify resources for social and economic advocacy. We have “flagged” all of the patient’s charts and plan to conduct home visits and re-check the children’s height, weight and hemoglobin status in the next 3-months.

Long term visions include the expansion of a nutrition/feeding program and the development of a mobile health care clinic to serve the school and surrounding area with twice monthly health screening and wellness clinics. We are also evaluating the development of a “school based health clinic” model that will send nurses from the clinic into the schools surrounding the parish every week for triage services and to continually track high risk children and their families; our ultimate goal is to create a “safety net” mechanism to catch children most vulnerable to homelessness or the myriad of preventable pediatric maladies.

Wednesday has our team in the mountains working in an isolated mining community at almost 15,000 feet above sea-level. Our goal is to bring medical and dental care to an impoverished area and to support the on-going efforts of the Parish of Father Alex. Stay tuned to our BlogSpot for more updates.