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Photograph Courtesy of O'Connor Hospital
Grace Chen Yu, a physician at O'Connor Hospital, assists a patient at 'Clinica Esperanza' in Roatan, Honduras, where she regularly visits as a volunteer.
Physician brings knowledge to Honduras
By Mary Gottschalk
Even after graduating from Stanford University School of Medicine and in her second year of residency at O'Connor Hospital, Dr. Grace Chen Yu still wasn't prepared for what she encountered at Clinica Esperanza in Roatan, Honduras.
"The most shocking thing when you go there after you've been practicing in the United States, is you're practicing with limited resources. You go and they don't have a CT scanner, and they just got their first ultrasound machine," Yu says.
"You can't order tests. You have to rely more on history taking and physical exam skills to come up with the diagnosis. Then you have to be resourceful with what you have.
"It's difficult. Sometimes we see things that in the United States could be scheduled for surgery or sent to a specialist and have a problem taken care of, but that's not necessarily feasible in a place where there are just so few resources.
"You do the best you can and rely on medications on hand, which are purely volunteer donations. It's a very different type of medicine, but it's a lot more rewarding and eye-opening."
Yu was in the second year of her residency when, she says, "I had the opportunity to do a one month international elective anywhere in the world. I had been looking at going to Honduras where I could practice the Spanish I had been using with patients in San Jose."
Clinica Esperanza caught Yu's attention.
The clinic is the direct result of a decision by Peggy Stranges, a registered nurse, to move to Roatan in 2001, after she had spent 14 years coordinating medical and dental mission teams that volunteered services in Honduras.
It didn't take long for word to spread that "Miss Peggy" had some medical expertise and local residents began knocking on her door.
In 2002, Stranges started a clinic with regular hours in the apartment below hers.
It has since moved to space donated by a local church and, through funding donations, a permanent attending physician joined the clinic in 2005. Dental services were added in 2006.
"The clinic opens its doors at 8 a.m., and there's no scheduling system," Yu says.
"By the time we arrive, there's a huge line of patients waiting to be seen. There's a local physician who works there as well, and we might see 30 to 40 patients."
The clinic stays open until every patient is seen.
Yu says some of the problems she saw, such as common colds, skin infections, asthma, diabetes and hypertension, are the same ones she encounters in her family medicine practice at O'Connor.
Other problems require what she calls "a crash course in tropical diseases.
"There are more exotic things like malaria, severe infectious diseases, parasitic infections and abscesses we don't get in the United States because people have access to medical care."
One of Yu's most vivid memories is of her first day of work in the clinic when a four-month-old girl weighing just seven pounds was brought in.
"It was the first time I came face to face with malnutrition and dehydration that plague people who live in the community," she says.
The baby, born to a mother addicted to crack, had been adopted by a woman who was trying her best but didn't know what to do to get the child to take nourishment.
"I felt totally at a loss. I felt I hadn't been trained to deal with this, and I relied on the other physicians there," Yu says.
The baby had to be hospitalized, but she survived.
Yu says on her return trips to the clinic, which are usually limited to just a week at a time, she sometimes sees patients she treated on previous visits. When they recognize her, she says it's rewarding.
While her one-month residency could easily have been the end of Yu's connection with Clinica Esperanza, it wasn't.
"I thought the work they are doing is really making a huge impact on the community and the people I was working with were inspirational," she says.
"I stayed in touch with everyone and I decided to return.
"A hope was to develop an alliance between our residency program in the Bay Area and the clinic. When I came back, all my colleagues were interested in hearing about it.
"The program was getting larger and the founder was getting more and more requests from residents interested in volunteering there.
"As the clinic in Honduras was expanding as well, I stayed on as a resident coordinator."
Yu now works with residents at O'Connor, as well as others throughout the United States, encouraging them to donate a month to the clinic and handling their applications.
"We've had two other residents from our program and several faculty have gone and spent time there," she says.
Born in Taiwan, Yu grew up in Mississippi and came to the Bay Area when she decided to attend Stanford.
She graduated in 2003 and completed her residency at O'Connor in 2006 in family medicine. When O'Connor offered her a job, she accepted.
"It made sense as I enjoyed working there as a resident. O'Connor's mission of serving the poor is one that I believe in and the faculty that would be my colleagues are people I held in high esteem."
Now Yu sees people who come to O'Connor's clinic and she also practices and teaches obstetrics.
A veteran of three trips to Clinica Esperanza, Yu says, "I'm planning to go yearly. It's more difficult now with my job and my personal obligations to go longer, but I'll try and go from one to two weeks a year. My involvement in it has truly been life-changing."
For additional information on Clinica Esperanza, visit www.clinicaesperanza.com. Financial donations may be sent to Mission Roatan, P.O. Box 472, Mahomet, IL 61853, with a note that it is for Clinica Esperanza.
