A foundational part of the vision for our health center in rural Guatemala is to provide a vulnerable and marginalized patient population with ACCESS to high quality healthcare.
Inaccessible healthcare is equivalent to no healthcare.
Barriers to healthcare are numerous and include- but, are certainly not limited to- financial, cultural, linguistic, and... TIME. By time, we particularly are thinking of patients suffering from urgent/emergent conditions. And that brings us to the point of the current post.
Our health center currently operates largely on a M-F 8am-5pm schedule- with the caveat that patients warranting inpatient care are given the option to stay overnight. This current schedule is the latest in a litany of iterations. The original schedule was 24/7/365. However, that original schedule had an Achilles' heel- the clinic had only one full-time physician (the author of this blog post). Such an arrangement proved unsustainable long-term (surprising perhaps to no one other than the author of this blog post).
Nevertheless, pathology continues to operate without regard to time of day. Illness doesn't keep bankers' hours. Thus, to bolster the access to high quality healthcare we are able to provide to our patients, we hope to:
2X the size of our local team
Adding 3 physicians
Adding 4 nurses.
Care for patients 24/7/365
Dramatically improving access to life-saving healthcare
Then, perhaps we will be able to modify the title of this post to:
Illness does NOT care what time it is... and neither do we.