The Floating Doctors Mission is to reduce the present and future burden of disease in the developing world, and to promote improvements in health care delivery worldwide.
Our Goals Include:
- Providing free acute and preventative health care services
- Facilitating community development & capacity initiatives
- Reducing child and maternal mortality
- Gathering clinical data for program and health landscape surveillance
- Improving access to specialist medical care in developing regions
- Promoting improvements in health care practice worldwide
Founded in 2009, Floating Doctors offers programs for doctors, nurses, dentists, and other healthcare workers to volunteer their time and talents to residents in communities throughout Panama. The organization’s goals include providing free acute and preventative healthcare services, facilitating community development and capacity initiatives, reducing child and maternal mortality, promoting improvements in healthcare practice worldwide, and more. Throughout the pandemic, we remained dedicated to our patients, maintaining our chronic care patients and pivoting to delivering nutritional support to our communities when supply chains and employment opportunities collapsed, leaving many of our patients without consistent food access for months.
Programs/Campaign Focus:
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Mobile Health Clinics: Travel to a healthcare facility is, for most of our patients, nearly impossible due to time constraints and the expense of travel, not to mention the difficulty of navigating the healthcare system. It is therefore imperative that we bring health care to our patients in the form of mobile clinics.
Our goal is to provide the best care possible. People come to us with a variety of ailments. This means we are sometimes extracting emergency patients from remote locations, and other times rubbing coconut oil on a patient’s legs to help prevent the development of ulcers. Our mobile clinics help provide our patients what they need, with consistent, readily accessible access to primary and specialist care.
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Dental and Oral Care: When access to oral and dental care is limited, a simple toothache can quickly become debilitating. Since launching our dental and oral health program in 2015, dental care has become one of the most sought-after services in clinic. Routinely, at every clinic, we have patients coming with the sole purpose of seeing a dentist- a well-check with our medical team is simply a bonus.
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Veterinary Care: Veterinary Public Health is intrinsically linked as a necessary part of community health. Recognizing that many issues that plague the communities where we work- particularly parasitic disease- reside within the animals, we have long known that treating the animals in our patients' communities and providing the education and tools to best care for them.
Veterinary volunteers from around the world join us and we partner with local institutions to provide ongoing care to common pets such as dogs and cats, to agricultural animals such as pigs and chickens, to jungle animals such as kinkajous and coatis.
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Women’s and Maternal Health: The Ngäbe have a birth rate higher than that of the rest of Panama. For women spending a significant part of their early adulthood either pregnant or breastfeeding, it is imperative that they receive consistent, quality prenatal and postpartum care. Working with the women in their communities, Floating Doctors monitors thousands of pregnancies and provides exams and counseling, and transfers patients to hospital care for more advanced needs.
In addition to monitoring pregnancies, providing access to family planning is an important component of reproductive care that we provide. Without easy access to inexpensive and effective birth control, birth rates are very high in the communities we serve, taking a toll on the women, family, and community health. In addition to health education, Floating Doctors provides family planning services to hundreds of women who request it, giving them more control over their reproductive health and their futures.
Ngäbe babies typically spend at least the first three years of their lives nursing. In many scenarios, it may be the cleanest source of nutrition. We work with mothers to make sure all steps are taken to ensure an adequate milk supply and that the mother is healthy enough to continue nursing if she wishes.
To learn more about our work and how you can join us, visit us at floatingdoctors.com or contact our Volunteer Director Genie at volunteerinfo@floatingdoctors.com
