What’s it like to provide medical assistance in locations only accessible by foot?
Harini Sridhar, a fourth-year medical student at UNC School of Medicine, discovered the answer firsthand this summer. With the support of the Office of Global Health Education, through the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, she joined a group of 20 attending physicians, residents and medical students from around the world on a month-long expedition with the Himalayan Health Exchange.
Started in 1996, the Himalayan Health Exchange unites healthcare professionals and students passionate about global health to provide care to the underserved populations in select, remote areas of the Indian Himalayas and Indo-Tibetan Borderlands.
Sridhar and her group spent their time in Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh, areas nestled in the Himalayan region of India. They slept in tents at high altitudes in village centers or at monasteries where they provided patient care. Each day began with a trek to a clinic site, sometimes covering as much as seven kilometers (4.35 miles).
“We started seeing patients in groups of three or four with a resident or attending with us supervising,” Sridhar said. “One medical student would do the interview and take the history or physical and another medical student would scribe on the patient’s physical paper medical record.”