Luzon

Dates and Facts

Project begin: 2018

Number of active doctors right now: 2 German Doctors

Missions: 17 voluntary missions in 2019. A total of 34 voluntary missions were performed by doctors from 2018 to the end of 2019.

Patient contacts: we expect to perform about 10,000 treatments per year.

Partner: The German Doctors are an officially registered NGO in the Philippines.

Structure: We provide basic medical care for indigenous people in remote mountainous villages with a ‘Rolling Clinic’. We leave from the doctors’ house in Conner and drive to 17 destinations on three different tours according to a fixed route. The first tour lasts 11 days, the second, 4 days, and the third, 3 days. We additionally train natives to become health workers in 33 seminar days over several months to strengthen the local healthcare system. The Rolling Clinic thereby offers them on-the-job training.

Mission sites: remote villages in the provinces Apayao and Kalinga

Most common health problems: pneumonia, various dermatologic diseases, and tuberculosis.

Priorities: basic medical care of indigenous mountain peasants, training of native health workers

Help arrives on foot and on 4 wheels

When the patients cannot go to the doctor, the doctor has to walk or drive to the patient. This statement describes the concept of the Rolling Clinic, which has proven itself in various German Doctors’ projects. In Luzon, a team of 2 German Doctors, a driver, and a pharmaceutical assistant leaves from the doctors’ house in Conner to visit mountain farmers in remote villages every weekday. Our team goes to 17 settlements according to a fixed schedule. The drive or hike there is often adventurous and requires physical fitness. The spectacular landscape compensates for the exertion. Our patients also undertake strenuous hikes often lasting several hours to reach our outpatient clinic. Some mothers and their children, the youngest of which is still in a sarong on her back, have walked barefoot over rocky paths without food or drink for 4 hours before reaching our clinic.

When our team arrives at the day’s destination, they quickly set up the mobile consulting area while a nurse leads early-morning gymnastics to brisk music with the fitter waiting patients. The Philippinos love that! Further waiting times are used for brief instructions on disease prevention, nutrition, and dental hygiene by a team member. A doctor first selects the emergency cases among the waiting patients so that they can be treated without delay. A nurse registers, weighs, and measures all patients’ blood pressures. All information is kept on patient cards so that the next doctors can have the entire anamneses at a glance. Most adult patients suffer from infectious diseases. Children usually have pneumonia or diarrhea.

To ensure unproblematic communication with the 60 to 90 patients we see every day, every doctor has an interpreter. These interpreters are nurses serving several villages and are employed by the community, which saves us personnel costs.

The Rolling Clinics provide optimal opportunities for on-the-job training for native health workers, whom we train in 33 seminar days. They can accumulate important practice experience under the supervision of our doctors. In the intermediate term, we enable the health workers to provide basic medical care for their fellow human beings. This is a decisive step in the direction of becoming independent of our assistance.

Life as it was 100 years ago

Our mission site on Luzon is the second poorest province in the Philippines. The very poorest of the poor live here. Time seems to have stood still in this very remote mountainous region. Many indigenous tribes still live as they did 100 years ago in the valleys of the Cordilleras. The Isneg, Kalinga, and other ethnic groups have eked out a living with exhausting hand labor building terraces on which they plant rice and vegetables in this harsh mountain range. The most famous are the Banaue rice terraces. They were proclaimed a World Cultural Heritage as a man-made environment by the UNESCO in 1995. This attracts some adventurous tourists to the region, which is difficult to reach. There were no doctors available her until February 2018. There were so-called Barangay Health Stations (state health centers) in some settlements, but these often only consisted of a shack manned (if at all) with poorly-trained health workers who hardly had any medicines. The mountain farmers here received no sound medical aid. However, the mountain farmers in the remote and extremely impoverished provinces of Apayao and Kalinga now (since Feb. 2018) belong to the international group of patients served by the German Doctors. They can also expect native health workers trained by the German Doctors to take over basic medical care in the foreseeable future.