The COVID-19 pandemic had prevented short term medical mission projects since our January 2020 project to Monte Plata. So, we were pleased and excited to return the Dominican Republic in September to a hospital in the village of Palenque. One of the primary functions of our project, in addition to helping the underserved with surgical care was to make sure that we could safely provide care. Our project was a pilot project to begin to reenter the short term mission field armed with new COVID protocols. There had been a small medical only project 3 weeks before our arrival but we were the first to do surgical procedures.
The primary precautions we took focused on three areas. One was personal protection. We took and used PPE for all our staff. All of our participants were fully vaccinated and tested negative prior to returning to the country. The second area was concerning social distancing. We limited our group to 17 participants to allow more space in our transportation (the yellow school bus), our sleeping accommodations and for our meals. The last precaution had to do with our patients. All patients were tested by us with a rapid antigen test on the day of surgery. Only one patient of 60 test done were positive. So that surgery was cancelled. All of the patients seen were fully vaccinated.
The good news is that we were able to safely see and provide surgical procedures to 57 patients. The local hospital averages 1 surgery per week normally. We now are focusing our attention on slowly ramping up the projects to the DR and around the world.