provide care within the community,” said Lunn, an ELCA pastor, registered nurse and former missionary to India and Liberia. “In Tanzania, for example, clinical officers do a lot of care in health centers in many smaller villages. In parts of the world where [people] haven’t been able to afford the [infrastructure], wards and hospital equipment, community care is the only option.” Yet hospitals are still an essential piece of the emerging community-based, primary health-care model. “There must be a place to go when people need to be hospital- ized,” Lunn said.
Like many global medical systems, the Tanzanian
church’s hospitals have worked hard to expand their fund- ing sources and staff training programs. “They have told us that they still want ELCA person- nel, including short- and long-term volunteers, for work in their health-care ministries,” said Steve Nelson, direc- tor for ELCA global service. “Providing volunteers in a wide range of health professional fields is one way we can tap into a valuable resource here in the U.S. that meets the requests expressed by our international partners and serves those in greatest need.”
Starting the supply line
Health professionals have a tough time fitting ELCA Global Mission’s usual patterns of three-, six- and nine- month volunteer positions. To keep credentials, they need to retain their jobs in the U.S., making long leaves unlikely. So the Lutheran Global Health Volunteers pro- gram will facilitate placements of three weeks or a month for people who can do a specific, valuable task. Lunn works with health-care leaders in the three coun- tries to develop a placement list: “I ask, ‘If you could have a volunteer for a month or two, what kind of background would you like them to have, what kind of skills? How can we best help you to get where you want to go?’ ” Domestic coordinator Ruth Reko primes the volunteer pump by contacting systems like Chicago’s Advocate Lutheran General and Brooklyn’s Lutheran Medical Cen- ter. On the wish list: nurses, doctors with various medical/ surgical specialties, occupational therapists, imaging tech- nicians, biomedical technicians, mental health and social workers, and administrators.
Service technicians may be needed, especially when the program expands to Liberia. Its infrastructure destroyed by a long civil war, the country has only one
Interested?
Would you or someone you know be interested in serving as a Lutheran Global Health Volunteer? For more infor- mation, visit
www.elca.org/LutheranGlobalHealthVolunteers or email
Lutheran.Health@elca.org.
September 2013 35
CAT scanner and few options for maintaining or repairing it. Maintenance professionals will also be critical. “If you don’t have a properly functioning sewer system within your hospital, that makes things difficult,” Lunn said. Volunteers receive basic overseas medical insurance (if requested), and visas and work permits required for their period of service. The local institution provides housing for a small charge. Volunteers are responsible for trans- portation (international and local), local living expenses, and passport and inoculation fees.
Once volunteers are matched to an opening, arrange
time off and complete an orientation, they will work under the direction of local staff.
“This is not medical tourism,” Reko said. “Priority will be given to people whose skills match the request, and in-country assignments will be quite focused on the needs of the providers.”
Mutual learning, growth Lunn expects both North American professionals and companion hospitals to benefit from the short-term place- ments. Hospitals will gain access to specialized skills. U.S. health-care workers will learn from working side-by- side with local professionals.
For Lunn, mutual learning and growth have been an integral part of his 11 years of international service. With 25 years in palliative care and hospice behind him when he arrived in India in 2002, he found himself a beginner once again as he practiced in a new culture. In his work with male patients, he first assumed that, as in the U.S., managing pain and controlling symptoms would be the most important goal. “I was wrong,” he said. “The most important thing was that their daughter be married before they died, and that they could make those arrangements because it was part of their duty in life. In the U.S., a father in hospice might want to see his daughter married, but it wouldn’t be priority No. 1 or even 2, 3 or 4.” Besides increasing their cross-cultural competency, Lutheran medical professionals who volunteer through the new program may also gain new clinical skills. Reko is in conversation with one hospital that is concerned about tropical diseases in its pediatric population. “They would like their residents to gain experience with these diseases in their originating countries,” she said. “It’s a fascinating example of the potential for mutual learning.”
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