 Provided by ReachMD
Creating Portable Health Clinics Where They're Needed Most
on Partners in Practice
Seven hundred women a day receive medical care inside moldy tents on the grounds of what once was the Grace Children's Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. But their circumstances will soon improve, thanks to an innovative nonprofit organization, Containers to Clinics, launched by PA Elizabeth Sheehan. Containers to Clinics converts empty shipping containers into state-of-the-art medical facilities in rural areas where electricity, running water and quality medical care are hard to find. Lisa Dandrea Lenell talks to Sheehan about where the idea for Containers to Clinics came from, what it takes to set up a container and what the organization is doing to help the people of Haiti following the devastating earthquake in January 2010.
Elizabeth Sheehan has two decades of experience delivering medical care in the US and abroad. She began her career in healthcare working in emergency rooms throughout the US as a Physician Assistant. After a year-long journey to 19 developing countries to investigate health care delivery systems, She became the medical director of The HALO Trust, an organization committed to village-based mine clearance. With HALO, she designed and implemented emergency care protocols for deminers and expatriate staff in Cambodia and Mozambique. After earning her Master's in public health in London, she workedfor USAID on a primary health care reconstruction project in post war Mozambique. Later, she worked as a clinician in the Maputo Central Hospital teaching triage protocols and assisting the delivery of emergency care. After Mozambique, Ms. Sheehan moved to Tanzania, where as part of the British High Commission she volunteered her medical skills and public health knowledge in orphanages, shelters and women's groups. For the past 15 years, she served as director and trustee of a family foundation, for which she designed granting strategies and evaluation tools. To date, the foundation has granted over 12 million dollars. Ms. Sheehan is a graduate of Holy Cross College, Duke University Medical Center's Physician's Assistant Program and The London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene jointly with the London School of Economics. She founded Containers to Clinics in 2008.
Lisa Dandrea Lenell is a physician assistant and the director of operations for an internal medicine practice in Illinois. She is passionate about bringing physician assistant and nurse practitioner issues into the spotlight, focusing on awareness and understanding of the professions. Mrs. Lenell is a graduate of the Physician Assistant Program at Midwestern University in Downers Grove, Illinois. She has continued her relationship with Midwestern University, working as adjunct faculty. She has published in the prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal Dermatologic Surgery and has been featured in several professional journals.
ReachMD, an innovative communications company, provides thought-provoking medical news and information to healthcare practitioners. Established to help increasingly time-constrained medical providers stay abreast of new research, treatment protocols and continuing education requirements, ReachMD delivers innovative and informative radio programming via XM Satellite Radio Channel 160 and online streaming developed by healthcare professionals for healthcare professionals.
The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.
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