Three employees from Blue Hill Memorial Hospital will participate in a Hancock County Medical Mission trip to Ecuador later this month. Sue Young, RN, is Blue Hill Memorial Hospital’s infection control nurse, who also serves as a diabetes educator and coaches patients on chronic disease management. Young has been on more than ten medical mission trips and notes that this year marks the 20th year of the Hancock County Medical Mission.
“This year we are going to Riobamba in central Ecuador. We’re about 125 miles from Quito, at 9,000 feet on the Avenue of the Volcanoes. Some of us will be working in an operating room at a military base. Others will be traveling to nearby communities to conduct medical clinics.”
Young looks forward to each mission trip. “These experiences never fail to help me and others put our lives in perspective. It’s especially rewarding to work with the teenage participants. The trips are life changing for these young people, opening their lives and hearts and in some cases, helping them to cement life plans in fields like medicine and education.”
April Chapman, RN, is Blue Hill Family Medicine’s practice manager. She will be leaving her two sons, ages six and 12, at home as she embarks on her first medical mission. “I am taking my 16 year-old niece with me, however,” says Chapman. “The sense of anticipation is building for both of us. I think we are both most apprehensive about the unknowns – what we will see and what conditions will be like.”
Blue Hill Memorial Hospital serves many patients who are financially disadvantaged, providing more than $1,355,000 in charity care over the last fiscal year. Still, Chapman notes that the differences between a third world country and the peninsula region are stark. “There is almost no access to medical care in most of these areas, except for these mission trips,” explains Chapman. “It’s hard for us to imagine.”
Also traveling to Ecuador is Meghan Lowell, who works in the laboratory of Blue Hill Memorial Hospital, and her daughter Emily. The Blue Hill Memorial Hospital staff and their family members will depart for Ecuador on February 6. The group will return to Maine on February 20.