Brittany Lively Helps Provide Health Care in Honduras
Brittany Lively (SAR’10) will travel to Honduras in January with Global Medical Brigades to provide free health care.
Brittany Lively is preparing this semester for a trip to Honduras, but it’s no vacation. Lively (SAR’10) is one of 25 undergraduate members of the Boston University chapter of Global Medical Brigades who will volunteer at a clinic in Nuevo Paraiso and its surrounding villages.
Global Medical Brigades is an international network of university clubs and volunteer organizations that provides health care to needy communities in developing countries. In 2006, its medical brigades, made up of student volunteers and medical professionals, provided health care to more than 30,000 patients in over 70 Central American villages. “Our goal as a group is to bring free, safe health care to those without access to it,” Lively says, and to provide a model for sustainable health care.
The students will take the patients’ vital signs and listen to their main complaints, says Tara O’Donohue (CAS’09), who founded the BU chapter last spring. The common ailments of these patients — who will be mostly women and children — include malnutrition, parasites, colds, body pains, fungal infections, and asthma, she says. Four medical professionals, including group chaperone Joel Snider, a School of Medicine clinical instructor of medicine, will travel with the students to provide care.
The group will bring a donation from Vitamin Angels, a nonprofit organization that provides nutritional supplements to developing countries, communities, and individuals in need. The vitamins will be given to 1,000 children for one full year, and to 500 pregnant women throughout their terms.
To prepare for the trip, the students will take a class in first aid, CPR, and triage, a medical system of dividing patients into three groups according to need. Additionally, most members, including Lively, who speaks conversational Spanish, are learning how to say medical terms, such as blood pressure, injection, and fever, in Spanish.
Rebecca McNamara can be reached at ramc@bu.edu.