Program Information
Through one-month to three-month internships, HEAL Interns learn about pediatric medicine and public health first-hand by working alongside American and Honduran doctors, residents, medical students, nurses, and other health care workers on the island of Roatan, Honduras.
Weekday mornings are dedicated to working in the Roatan Volunteer Pediatric Clinic (RVPC), an outpatient clinic located in the Roatan Public Hospital and run by Global Healing. The student intern serves as Clinic Coordinator, locating resources (i.e. meds, specialty referrals, etc.) for patients, helping them through the logistics of utilizing these resources (i.e. locating funding for trips to the mainland for follow-up care), and notifying the volunteer physicians in the clinic about existing resources. Interns work with long-term patients individually, coordinating care among many health care providers and locating resources where there may not seem to be many. Students may also administer a public health survey created by our undergraduate and medical volunteers to provide the clinic with more comprehensive information about the characteristics and needs of the patient population.
Working alongside volunteer physicians from the United States in this unique clinical setting will provide students with the unique opportunity to learn from the physicians' struggle to hone the skills they learned at home to the resources at hand.
After mornings in the clinic, HEAL Interns schedule their
afternoons to work with Global Healing staff and local community health workers on projects that address local needs at the time of the internship. Opportunities
include: interning in a local HIV outreach clinic, volunteering in
private family medicine clinics run by Honduran physicians and
missionaries, working with local public health groups to train
community health volunteers, and carrying out other individual
public health projects or research.
Click here for The Stanford Daily article on the Student Internship [.pdf version].