Pharmacies, Meds, and Medical Volunteers (January 2014 -- Month 31 in the D.R.)

 

This month we had another busy week of medical field clinics in 4 low income communities!  We welcomed 6 U.S. PA students and 4 U.S. MDs as they joined our team of community health workers and staff in the clinics.  In the photo above the Community Health Workers are running Intake and Medical Records, while the PA students help set up the triage area, at the beginning of the clinic day.

  We took the PA students and MDs out to check out the Latrines (out-houses) being built by HHI and families in the communities. Here's one that I am sitting on. It will soon have walls and a roof to give the family privacy. Latrines help improve sanitation conditions in communities where people sometimes just use the restroom in the great outdoors around the community which can contaminate their living situation and lead to illnesses in the communities.

Nurse Jenny and Interpreter Pierre (above) proved that sometimes the best medicine for kids is a hug, a nap, and some giggle time. Go Jenny and Pierre! Thanks for the help!

PA student Jen teaches a 1 year old future doctor how her stethoscope works.

 PA students and Community Health Workers check vitals on community members waiting in line to see the doctors in the little church in the mountain community of Negro Melo.Thanks to my friend Jacalyn, there in the corner, for that happy "thumbs up!" :)

Now Here's a Separate Adventure:

Before the week of Field Clinics my colleague Marineli and I got the chance to travel to the big city of Santiago to meet with representatives of medication distribution/pharmaceutical companies, and to visit the lab where one of the pharmaceutical companies that supplies meds to our patients makes and packages those meds.  Since medications made and distributed in the D.R. are not always made correctly (there is inconsistency in how well they work depending on which company made them because they don't all have the right amounts of the correct medication components actually in the pills. It's a problem the Dominican Government is actively trying to combat, which is good, because many doctors and patients here feel that the meds they sometimes take and prescribe are not effective because the manufacturers lied about the components in the meds.)  So it was great to be able to visit the sanitary lab at Iberofarmicos where many o fthe meds we purchase for our patients are made.   Above, Marineli and I suited up in scrubs, lab coats, and sanitary slippers for our tour.

 Here's me (white coat) with our tour guide -- the physician in charge of the labs.

Here are the women packaging the thousands of packets of meds into boxes -- by hand.  A boring job that I suspect is very hard on the hands.  But they did it very carefully and professionally. God bless then for doing this 6-8 hours per day each week, each month, all year.

Here's another shot of the quiet, industrious med-packaging room.

 

Here I am in the lab where they make sure the pills all contain the proper ingredients.

And here is one of many rooms where lab techs in scrubs and gloves check the meds for quality, then move them on to the next step of the packaging process.

It was all very interesting, and the staff at the Iberofarmacos company (photos above) were very proud of the measures they take to provide quality control in their pharmaceutical manufacturing labs.  Marineli and I enjoyed our very informative, scrubbed up adventure, and can now share with local health workers in our region what we observed at the Iberofarmacos lab.