Floating Doctors + Humanitarian Medicine

The Floating Doctors Mission is to reduce the present and future burden of disease in the developing world, and to promote improvements in health care delivery worldwide.

• Providing free acute and preventative health care services and delivering donated medical supplies to isolated areas.
• Reducing child and maternal mortality through food safety/prenatal education, nutritional counseling and clean water solutions.
• Studying and documenting local systems of health care delivery and identifying what progress have been made, what challenges remain, and what solutions exist to improve health care delivery worldwide.
• Using the latest communications technologies to bring specialist medical knowledge to the developing world, and to share our experiences with the global community and promote cooperation in resolving world health care issues.

Sound like something that you might be intrested in helping out? (Freelance MD is already making a small monthly payment to help foot some of the bills.)

You can help Floating Doctors with a donation of any size.

Volunteer medical providers?

Doctors, nurses, PAs, NPs, dentists, optometrists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, medical students, public health researchers, educators, engineers, and anyone with a pair of willing hands and the desire to help out in this world are welcome to participate in our project.

Everyone has some special talent or characteristic that can be used in the service of others. We pride ourselves on maximizing the experience of our volunteers to express their particular talent in a way that brings the most help to our patients.

We have no minimum or maximum length of stay and a reputation for working hard and being easy to work with. It is impossible to know exactly what kinds of cases we will see, or what situations we will encounter. All we know is that it will be an adventure of the heart—at some point, there will be a moment where your presence can mean a tremendous change in a person’s life.

Here is a typical experience for a volunteer…a surgeon from Austria vacationing in Panama decides to joining Floating Doctors for a one-day mobile clinic to a remote island indigenous village.

“Life is not about seeing what you want and how to get it but rather is about seeing what you have and how to give it.” Frank Baxter