HPD Perspectives Magazine Summer/Fall 2019

10 | DR. PALLAVI PATEL COLLEGE OF HEALTH CARE SCIENCES Q: What were the major factors influencing your decision to become involved with both outreach trips to Puerto Rico? Ortiz: I helped initiate the first medical outreach trip to Puerto Rico because it’s something extremely personal to me. Hours and days after the hurricane, it was very difficult to communicate with family and friends on the island. It was even harder to ship basic life necessities and watch the island’s health care resources decline so rapidly. As a Puerto Rican, I felt strongly about creating a medical outreach program, such as this one, because I knew it would provide vital resources to people in these communities. In November, our first group had a big impact on this fact- finding trip. By April, Dr. Shaw and Vanessa Blanco from NSU’s Puerto Rico Regional Campus coordinated a more expansive second trip. I was curious and excited to witness how much the outreach program had grown in such little time. Estrada: The major factor influencing my decision to be part of this medical outreach program is that I consider Puerto Rico to be my second home, having spent every summer there as a child. Seeing the struggle continuing more than a year after the hurricane broke my heart. I was given the opportunity to make a difference for many people still laboring to rebuild their lives, as well as provide them with needed physical therapy services. BY MARY T. BLACKINTON, ED.D., PT, GCS, CEEAA NSU’s Dr. Pallavi Patel College of Health Care Sciences organized two medical outreach trips to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico under the leadership of two faculty members—Keiba Shaw, D.P.T., Ed.D., PT, professor and chair of the college’s Communi- ty Outreach Committee, and Ovidio Olivencia, D.P.T., PT, OCS, associate professor from the Doctor of Physical Therapy (D.P.T.) Program—Fort Lauderdale. The first trip occurred in November 2018 and included physical therapy (PT) faculty members and students from both the Tampa Bay and Fort Lauderdale/Davie campuses. The second, which occurred in April 2019, included faculty members from the PT and psychology programs, as well as a volunteer nurse, a medic, and three student translators from the University of South Florida (USF). In the following Q&A, two participants from the Tampa Bay D.P.T. Program—Carla Ortiz, a class of 2021 PT student, and Jessica Estrada, D.P.T., PT, a 2015 NSU alumna and a current lab assistant in the Tampa Bay D.P.T. Program—discuss their experiences. The April 2019 Puerto Rico medical outreach PT team consisted of NSU faculty members and students from Tampa Bay and Fort Lauderdale, as well as USF's health sciences department translators. OVERSEAS OUTREACH Helping Puerto Ricans Heal