Medical Missions: Columbia Nursing Students Volunteer

Volunteer work overseas is one of the many ways that Columbia Nursing students gain perspective on the cultural diversity of the patients they serve and develop a first-hand understanding of how limited financial and medical resources can impact health outcomes in underserved communities.

Faculty, students and staff have donated time, money, and supplies to a wide variety of medical relief efforts around the globe, with outreach in countries including Haiti, Bangladesh, Mexico and Ecuador - to name a few. Through these efforts, students develop a keen awareness of the variety of unique health challenges that impact patient populations at home and around the globe, knowledge many students choose to apply toward volunteer work during the weeks when classes aren't in session.

Nadia Elgoghail, a family nurse practitioner student, the daughter of an Egyptian engineer and an American teacher, may very well have medical missions in her DNA. Growing up, she volunteered as a candy striper near her home in Port Huron, Michigan, inspired by her grandmother the nurse and her grandfather the pediatrician. Later, she went to Cameroon as a community health volunteer for the Peace Corps. This winter, she returned to Cameroon to volunteer as a nurse, bearing donated medical supplies gathered from friends, family and many members of the Columbia Nursing community.

“When I left the Peace Corps, I always had it in the back of my mind to return one day, and being a nurse opened up a whole new level of opportunities to give back to this community in Cameroon where there’s just a staggering amount of need for so many things we take for granted here in the U.S.,” Elgoghail says.

For three weeks this winter, she volunteered at a hospital, offering donations of clothing syringes, gloves, medicines, and mosquito nets as a temporary fix to vast unmet medical needs. Much of what she distributed in Cameroon was material that might have gone to waste in the U.S. Here, for example, sterile dressing kits are discarded once they’re opened, even when only one of several packets of gauze is used. Some of that leftover gauze went with Elgoghail to Cameroon, where patients might have wounds dressed with bandanas or scraps of clothing if no gauze was available. She also got supplies from several offices operated by the medical group where she worked in New York, renting a Zipcar and enlisting a friend to collect items such as lidocaine and sterile gloves.  

One boy she treated had malaria. Elgoghail gave his family some clothes for him, including the first pair of shoes he ever had that weren't made of plastic. She also gave them a mosquito net to protect against more bites that might transmit malaria – one of several bed nets donated by Columbia Nursing. Another man, she offered food, knowing it wasn’t a sustainable donation but unable to let him go without while she was there providing care. He showed up at the hospital with bone protruding out of the skin at his hip, the tissue so necrotic that his leg had to be amputated. He had cancer, a fever, and bloody diarrhea. He was also hungry.

“Hospitals in Cameroon don’t give patients food – there, that’s the family’s job,” says Elgoghail. “If nobody brings food, they don’t eat, so I brought food.”

Azsha Matthews, also a family nurse practitioner student, encountered hunger and poverty just as staggering when she went to Ghana this winter as a medical volunteer.  Matthews had never left the U.S. before she arranged this two-week trip though the nonprofit organization A Broader View. She pitched in at a hospital, a mobile blood pressure screening clinic, and an orphanage. And Matthews stuffed her luggage with some of the donated medical supplies that Elgoghail couldn’t fit in the four suitcases she took to Cameroon. The rest of Matthews' bags were filled with supplies she collected on her own.

The work was much different than what Matthews had encountered in the U.S. She saw a diabetic coma for the first time in Ghana, and didn’t have any fast-acting insulin to give the patient. Instead, she had to watch as the family was sent away with a prescription and hope that they would find a way to fill it. The hospital had no pharmacy, and it’s not unusual for patients to bring their own medicines when they need treatment. She also saw a woman getting a C-section start to flinch then writhe in pain as the anesthesia wore off while she was being stitched up after surgery. There was just so much anesthesia, and the procedure had taken a little too long. The baby wasn’t breathing, and without ventilators or a neonatal intensive care unit, the nurses alternated between performing CPR and holding the infant upside down to smack the soles of his feet.

“I was amazed when that baby finally cried, and amazed at just how much everybody did for these patients when they had so few resources available,” says Matthews. “People have an incredible about of passion and resourcefulness to practice medicine in Ghana, and it was so inspiring to be a part of it.”

Family nurse practitioner student Emily Doctor got a crash course in the resourcefulness required to practice medicine in the developing world on her first day as a volunteer in Cambodia this winter. After finishing work at a clinic where she was placed by International Medical Relief, there was an accident on her way home. A truck collided with five men riding together on a single motorcycle. Two of the men on the bike died instantly. The other three were in shock, suffering from fractures and other injuries from the impact. It was pitch black. Doctor and other volunteers scrambled up the road to help. They used scrub pans as tourniquets. They grabbed bandanas from bystanders to use as bandages. And they collected $500 in donations to pay for the 45-minute ambulance trip to transport the three survivors to the nearest hospital.

“I worked as a trauma nurse in Houston before I came to Columbia Nursing, and I have never seen anything like this,” says Doctor. “These guys didn’t have helmets. They didn’t have shoes. And we did so much for them considering how little we had to work with.”

At the clinic, Doctor dealt with a lot more circumstances she had never seen before. She treated young girls with urinary tract infections, suspecting that they might be victims of sex trafficking or sexual abuse but able to do little more than offer antibiotics and a psychologist to speak to the families. She also did blood pressure screenings on patients who clearly needed blood pressure medications, but found they had no money to see a doctor or pay for medicine. “These people were ticking time bombs, and they had no idea,” Doctor says.
Like Elgoghail and Matthews, Doctor also arrived with as many donated medical supplies as she could carry, including $2 reading glasses she purchased at a dollar store. Doctor is already considering her next trip, which may be a medical mission with Mercy Ships.

“I came away from this experience in Cambodia wanting to work in pediatrics and wanting to do more to help kids who for whatever reason – whether it’s poverty or culture or something else – just haven’t had access to the care that they need,” says Doctor. “As a student and as a nurse, I think it’s hard to say just how valuable it is to volunteer overseas. It certainly changes you for the better, and I think it has made me stronger as a nurse and as a person.”