Service Trips

MEDICAL CARE: We provide primary care, dental, and ophthalmologic care to over 1,000 patients on each of our medical service trips in Morazan, San Pedro, and Trinidad, Honduras. We also hope our service trips are an impactful experience for our volunteers by forming a tight-knit team that works together and embraces the opportunity to make a longitudinal impact in the communities we are serving. Ultimately, we strive for a gold-standard quality of care for all patients who walk into our clinics and are consistently working towards that goal.

To do this, we have collaborated with the Honduran Ministry of Health to partner with three clinics in regions where access to any healthcare is extremely limited. We have created transportation and follow-up mechanisms at these nearby clinics for our patients with chronic disease. We also utilize the encrypted, HIPAA-compliant REDCap database platform to serve as an electronic medical record at our clinics, which will enable us to monitor our patient’s health and enable more specialized care in the future. Next, we are focusing on obtaining medical equipment such as lab equipment, along with X-ray, ultrasound, and EKG machines to improve the standard of care at our clinics.
HEALTH EDUCATION: While waiting for their prescriptions, interested patients can attend our Health Education seminars. These seminars intend to teach primary prevention and healthy lifestyle practices to prevent chronic disease such as high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, arthritis, and more. We also emphasize the importance of responsible use of pain medication and antibiotics, water consumption, nutrition, oral hygiene, and family planning. AcE is collecting survey data pre-and post-seminar to demonstrate the effectiveness of our curriculum. These outcomes will allow us to continuously improve our seminars, conduct important needs assessments in each community, and better tailor our clinics to meet these needs.
RESEARCH: In collaboration with our partners, the Honduran Ministry of Health, the Clinica Medica San Lucas Hospital, and our clinics, we have developed a variety of global health studies in specialties such as orthopedics, primary care, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, general surgery, and OBGYN. Given the scarcity of public health statistics in rural Honduras, the goal of our research is to fill that void for the Ministry of Health and provide them with the needed public health data to make evidence-based health policies.

Our initial studies aim to identify the overall disease burden of common health conditions such as diabetes, hearing loss, arthritis, etc. and any underlying risk factors that may be influenced by public health policy. This data will also be used to improve the medical care at our clinics by initiating nonoperative care and monitoring patients who may eventually be candidates for surgery, either by referral to a tertiary care center or by a future AcE surgical service trip.
ETHICAL STANDARDS: Understanding the inherent inequalities when working in underserved communities, we aim for AcE to serve as a model for a high-quality nonprofit organization and information technology infrastructure within the areas of global health and education development. With this goal in mind, we believe that all of our efforts should demonstrate clear benefit to the Honduran people and enhance the service we provide for them. It is vital that our efforts be patient-centric, respecting the autonomy and privacy of the Honduran population we serve.

This is why we have implemented the use of an HIPAA-compliant electronic medical record and established partnerships with nearby clinics, to establish continuity of care for our patients. This is also why we are working to obtain needed medical equipment for our partner clinics and to improve our own quality of care. We also travel to the same three regions for our service trip program, establishing close relationships within each community and relying on our Honduran colleagues to identify the need in their own communities. There is no minimal education/training requirement to join our service trip program, as we firmly believe that anyone can be given a valuable role on our service trip program. However, we are extremely cognizant of making sure everyone is practicing within their appropriate level of training and in a culturally competent manner. This is why all volunteers are required to complete the AcE Service Trip Curriculum

The Action for Education Internal Ethics Board will act as a mechanism for internal reflection on the impact of data collection on our Honduran patients and on our academic community. It will include Hondurans and individuals from diverse personal and professional and backgrounds to obtain input from a number of perspectives and stakeholders. This Internal Board of Ethics is intended to act synergistically with a formal Institutional Review Board (IRB) to yield consensus on best practices for high quality data collection and research. It also allows for an internal review process to take place before initiating contact for external IRB review to ensure that each proposal meets the standards and ethical principles of Action for Education. A three-person committee from our Internal Ethics Board must then formally decide to reject, revise, or accept a study proposal, before we seek to obtain IRB approval from affiliated hospitals in Honduras and the United States. We are completely dedicated to providing humane and ethical care, and are consistently seeking input and evaluating our internal processes to ensure they meet our standards.

Future Goals

Forming Partnerships - We have formed a formal partnership with clinics in each of our partner regions of rural Honduras. Thus far, we have partnered to give these clinics needed medical equipment such as X-ray, ultrasound, and EKG machines, along with lab equipment and laptops that we will now be able to utilize on our medical service trip program. We also hope to incorporate a transportation and accompaniment model, championed by the late Dr. Paul Farmer, within our partner communities. Through this, we would train and hire local Hondurans tasked to transport patients to nearby clinics/hospitals and deliver their needed medications. We would also keep our partner clinics continuously supplied with medications, equipment, and supplies.

Longitudinal Care - We also have a referral system for follow-up of our patients with chronic disease seen on our medical service trips, and we are consistently looking for ways to improve our longitudinal care. Moving forward, we are hoping to incorporate the REDCap database platform at each of our partner clinics to act as a joint electronic medical record system with our AcE Service Trip Program. This would not only improve the longitudinal tracking of our patients, but would enable us to collaborate on invaluable epidemiologic and intervention-based research in the community.

Medical Care - Our organization has recently formed the Primary Care and Pediatrics Departments led by physicians focused on advancing our primary care initiatives and providing the highest quality of care possible to Honduras. We plan to expand to include various internal medicine subspecialties, including cardiology, gastroenterology, and oncology. These departments aim to collaborate with the Ministry of Health to expand our partnerships with clinics and hospitals, develop new research proposals, recruit additional physicians and providers, improve vaccination rates, and work closely with our schools to improve their overall well-being.

Surgical Care - Our organization has also recently formed the Orthopedic Surgery, Vascular Surgery, Otolaryngology, OBGYN, Ophthalmology, and General Surgery Departments headed by surgeons focused on establishing and advancing needed surgical care to our patients. The treatment of surgical conditions is virtually nonexistent in rural Honduras, and our goal is to change that by partnering with existing surgical centers such as the Clinica Medica San Lucas Hospital, before eventually building our own. Through the use of our REDCap database, we will now have medical records of potential candidates for surgery. By collaborating with local physicians and remotely following up with our patients through the use of donor laptops and iPads, we will ensure that our patients will receive the needed surgical and postoperative care they deserve to function and prosper.

Ancillary Health - The Ancillary Health Department was recently founded to arrange comprehensive ancillary care both remotely and in-person to our partner communities. These services include but are not limited to dentistry, physical therapy, mental health services, genetic counseling, and social work. In addition to assisting on our service trips, our respected AcE professionals will collaborate directly with our partner clinics and orphanages to improve our patients’ physical and mental health. We will also incorporate a social services program to enable qualified patients to sign up for national health insurance and other social services.