I plan to deploy as a volunteer Physician Assistant with Floating Doctors in Panama this summer, embedding directly into mobile medical teams that service isolated Ngäbe-Buglé communities across the Bocas del Toro archipelago. Operating in these austere, water-bound environments, I will provide comprehensive primary care, manage acute medical emergencies, stabilize chronic conditions, and deliver preventative health education. Because these regions lack permanent medical infrastructure, my role extends beyond standard clinical intake; I will utilize point-of-care diagnostics and low-resource clinical triaging to optimize patient outcomes with the limited tools on hand.
This project will make a tangible difference by bridging a critical gap in health equity. For patients facing profound geographic and economic barriers to healthcare, this intervention provides immediate relief from preventable illnesses, untreated infections, and unmanaged chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes. Furthermore, by utilizing my fluency in Spanish and my professional background in remote, resource-constrained medicine, I can provide culturally safe, immediate care without the friction of a language barrier. This ensures that clinical assessments are accurate and that treatment plans are mutually understood and respected. By easing the immediate clinical burden on the permanent field staff, my presence increases the daily patient capacity of the mobile clinics, ensuring more individuals receive the high-quality, compassionate care they inherently deserve.
The primary beneficiaries of this project are the Indigenous Ngäbe and Buglé peoples living in the remote, coastal, and island communities of the Bocas del Toro region. This population faces severe systemic health disparities driven by extreme geographic isolation. Accessible only by boat, many of these villages are entirely cut off from Panama’s centralized healthcare system, leaving residents with little to no access to routine, emergency, or preventative medical care.
I am dedicating my efforts to this population because their challenges mirror the core focus of my professional life and doctoral studies: addressing health inequities in communities isolated by geography. My daily practice in remote Indigenous villages in Alaska has given me a deep understanding of the complex socio-ecological factors that impact health in isolated regions—such as food insecurity, lack of clean water, and the logistical friction of medical transport. Additionally, as a member of a Latino household, I feel a profound personal responsibility to serve Spanish-speaking and Indigenous communities in Latin America. The Ngäbe-Buglé people possess a rich cultural heritage but bear a disproportionate burden of preventable morbidity and mortality. Serving this population allows me to apply specialized skills in austere medicine where they are needed most, ensuring that a community historical underserved by traditional infrastructure receives equitable, respectful, and high-quality medical attention.
The immediate impact of this project will be measured by the improved clinical outcomes of the patients treated during the deployment—specifically through successful acute interventions, targeted health literacy, and the continuity of chronic disease management. By treating infections early, managing prenatal health, and stabilizing cardiovascular risks, this work directly mitigates the need for costly, complex emergency medical evacuations, ultimately saving lives and reducing systemic burdens.
The long-term impact, however, lies in how these learnings will carry forward into my permanent practice and doctoral research in Emergency Medicine and Global Health (EMGH). Professionally, navigating the distinct logistical and epidemiological challenges of the Bocas del Toro archipelago will broaden my clinical adaptability. While the sub-Arctic and the tropics present entirely different environmental barriers, the underlying principles of resource-constrained medicine—improvisation, community trust, and public health surveillance—are identical.
The insights gained from working alongside Floating Doctors’ sustainable, mobile healthcare delivery model will directly inform my doctoral project on improving health outcomes in remote populations. I will bring these cross-cultural, low-resource methodologies back to my clinical work in remote Alaska, synthesizing global health strategies to improve care delivery systems for Indigenous communities at home. Ultimately, this deployment will refine my capabilities as a clinician and a global health advocate, allowing me to better contribute to the broader blueprint of international humanitarian medicine.
Panama: A Full-Circle Mission
More than ten years ago, I was inspired to become a physician assistant by an organization doing exactly the kind of work I hoped would one day define my career: bringing medicine beyond the walls of hospitals and clinics and into communities where geography, resources, and circumstance make healthcare difficult to reach. This summer, that inspiration came full circle when I traveled to Panama and finally had the privilege of serving alongside Floating Doctors in the Bocas del Toro region.
Floating Doctors provides medical care to Indigenous communities throughout the Bocas del Toro archipelago, returning to many of these communities on a rotating basis to provide continuity of care in places where access to healthcare can be extraordinarily challenging. I joined the team for a multi-day mobile clinic, traveling by boat into one of these communities and establishing what would become both our clinic and our home for the next several days. We set up our hammocks, unpacked our medical supplies, and got to work.
For three to four days, we lived alongside the community and cared for patients from morning until the work was done. It was medicine stripped down to its most fundamental purpose: listening, adapting to the environment and resources available, and doing whatever we could to leave the community healthier than we found it.
The experience was humbling, inspiring, and profoundly human. The lives we touched mattered, but equally powerful was the kindness and energy we received in return. Despite differences in language, culture, geography, and circumstance, the connection between patient and clinician remained remarkably familiar. I was also given the unexpected opportunity to do some incidental precepting and teaching with young PA students beginning their own journeys in medicine. There was something especially meaningful about standing in a remote community in Panama, teaching future PAs while simultaneously fulfilling the dream that had led me to the profession more than a decade earlier.
This was my first international medical mission as a PA, but in many ways it felt like returning to the beginning.
I became a PA because I wanted a profession that could take me into the far reaches of the planet and humanity—to places where medicine requires adaptability, humility, service, and a willingness to meet people exactly where they are. I wanted the opportunity to use what I had learned to make people, places, and communities a little better and a little healthier than the way I found them.
In Panama, more than ten years after first imagining that life, I finally got to live it.
And I left reminded that this was never simply something I wanted to do as a PA.
It was one of the reasons I became one.
