Location: Bocas Del Toro region, Panama
Program: Floating Doctors
Students: Sabrina Johnson, MD ’25, and Erin Kelly, MD ’25

We volunteered with the Floating Doctors program for three weeks during the summer between our M1 and M2 years. The organization is based in a group of islands in the Bocas Del Toro region of Panama. They provide medical care to the indigenous Ngäbe people by setting up mobile clinics at 29 different Ngäbe communities every three months.

 

We traveled by boat to remote communities each week and stayed in the communities to provide medical care for multi-day clinics. As medical students, we took vitals, conducted patient interviews in Spanish and learned how to do injections, ultrasounds and urine tests, and shadowed many providers during our time. We attended presentations on different aspects of the culture and participated in case rounds with the entire group to discuss what we saw each week. We also got the opportunity to attend home visits and hiked to the homes of patients who could not travel in order to give them medical care. On the weekends, we explored the beautiful region by hiking, going into Bocas Del Toro town, scuba diving or heading to the beach. We learned so much and had an incredible immersion into the Panamanian culture.

 
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