Please read the following scenario, noticing what stirs in you, and respond to the questions that follow.

Maria’s Story

A US medical short-term team comprised of 3 nurses and 4 different specialty providers: Family Medicine, Geriatrics, Women’s Health and a Pediatrician were serving a village community in Central America. They would be working alongside a local Central American medical team doing village outreach. Knowing that they would be working in an area with limited resources, they asked the local doctors for a list of medications that would be available at the outreach. They also set up a plan to have patients see an appropriate provider based on their medical needs. When the US medical team arrived at the village location in the morning, the medications they had expected were completely different. As patients came in from seeing the nursing staff in triage, the only thing the patients had documented was their blood pressure. Other vital information was missing: patient’s age, weight, heart rate, and even their name sometimes. The patients were also being sent to random medical providers rather than the medically appropriate one, as they had planned. There were hundreds of patients to be seen just in that first hour of the outreach. The US team was so busy and was not able to pause, regroup and come up with a new plan to restructure and streamline the process. The local medical team, however, seemed to have viewed all of this as the “normal” process of a village outreach.

2026 LIA South Sudan Medical Team