HPIC at Work

This doctor is flying

When Dr. Ben Cavilla completed his family medicine training in June, the last thing he wanted to do was to get tied down to a clinic.

"My career is based on humanitarian work and it's easy for a doctor to get on a treadmill," he says. Ideally, he will work in Canada as a general practitioner for eight months and devote three to four months a year to missions in developing countries with the NGO he founded called the Flying Doctors of Canada.

"This is what I've always wanted to do," says the 32-year old doctor based in Victoria, B.C. He began doing medical missions as a student and El Salvador was the first place he went to. "My experience in Central America redirected my career goals. I abandoned my goal of becoming a radiologist and planned on gaining a broader experience to be more versatile in the field."

This past summer he brought a team down to Nicaragua for the first official mission trip of the Flying Doctors of Canada. The missions will feature clinics and development projects. "I see myself as a janitor with an overflowing toilet. There is a need to get the plumber involved. We need to ask why people in a particular community are getting sick to begin with," he explains.

Communities will be selected carefully. "The community must need intervention, want intervention and be ready for it," he says. "We would aim to leave a community within three to five years."

On the first trip, Cavilla went for a week and brought three Physician Travel Packs. "We wouldn't have been able to function without the packs," he says. "We could never have procured between $15,000- $20,000 in medication."

The Nicaraguan government is very strict about medicine entering the country. ""Thank God we went with PTPs," he says.

Cavilla's team consisted of four doctors and two nurses. They were based in San Juan del Sur and from there they went out to various villages to provide two days of clinics in each. In total, they saw 392 patients in six days. "Every day we packed up the PTPs and then re-sorted them for the following day," he says.

Cavilla estimates that 80 per cent of the patients they treated were women. "The issues we saw related to poor maternal health care, sexually transmitted infections, pelvic inflammatory disease and births gone bad," he says.

One patient who stood out for Cavilla was a 24-year-old woman who had a hole in her heart. "This would have led to her death in the next five years without treatment. We are paying for her care and she will be having cardiac surgery."

Planning is underway for the 2010 trip "We are hoping to expand quickly and work with HPIC again. We couldn't have done this trip without HPIC."