Between the two medical events in Ladyville and San Ignacio, medical profes-sionals have treated close to 9,000 people. A lot of collaboration with BTH 2017 staff and Belize’s government ministries are key parts to these events. As the mission presses forward leaders assess and adapt to challenges as necessary to meet their goals.
“A challenge we’ve identified with the medical event in San Ignacio specifically is transportation for the people from the surrounding villages,” said Maj. Mitch Bishop, who serves as the officer in charge of the BTH 2017’s civil affairs team for the upcom-ing medical event in Dangriga. “So, to mitigate this in the upcoming event, we’re work-ing with local leadership at the lowest level to try and coordinate transportation for peo-ple surrounding the Dangriga area.”
Bishop went on to explain how working closely with the ministry of education has been helpful to get the word out.
“Something we’ve done here in San Ignacio and are implementing for the third medical event is through the ministry of education,” Bishop said. “We’re getting schools to come to the event on a field trip, where they’ll get to see big military vehicles, receive a gift bag with notebooks and pencils as well as be seen by providers for a wellness visit.”
An integral piece of these events is spreading the word to surrounding areas so the population knows when and where the event is. Bishop and others benefited from other military organizations through collaboration to meet this hefty goal.
“Although civil affairs, public affairs and information operations are inherently different and have separate functions, we’ve worked closely together from a grass roots face to face approach in the surrounding areas of Dangriga, to T.V., media, radio inter-views and flyers to make it happen,” Bishop said.
Army South personnel also come to assess the medical events for training effec-tiveness and to discuss execution for future BTH missions.
“These events are designed to give U.S. medical personnel an opportunity to display and train in their war-time function,” said Col. Angela Mysliwiec, who serves as command surgeon for U.S. Army South. “Assessments of these events ensure we’re meeting our training objective. We want to be sure we’re building war-time readiness with our personnel, and we want to ensure that we’re giving a service to our partner nation.”
Training and partnership through service has been an underlying theme throughout the exercise, Mysliwiec said. We’ve had U.S. and Columbian military medi-cal staff, British, Canadian and local non-governmental organizations chip in their time too, which adds to the experience.
For Pfc. Karlina Mcintosh, a Casper, Wyoming native who serves as a medic with the Wyoming National Guard’s 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery Regiment, this is her first mission as a qualified medic. She said that the event provided a lot of useful and practical application.
“It has been amazing, I’ve loved the experience and culture,” Mcintosh said. “I’ve been able to get a lot of hands-on training and one of the most valuable lessons I’ve taken away from this event is patient flow. A big part of mission success is your patient flow and after 10 days, I think that we’ve finally got the flow down pat,” Mcintosh said.