Across the globe, access to and quality of healthcare has improved over the last 30 years. 167 countries saw a significant improvement in these two areas. However, health disparities remain and have gotten worse in some parts of the world. One of the factors attempting to close the gap is travel physicians, who go abroad to different countries to help and support in cases of emergencies, disease outbreaks, teaching, and more.
An insight to physicians that travel abroad is Dina Labkovsky, who currently works as a cardiac nurse at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center. She has worked in the field for 20 years. Labkovsky was born in Moscow, Russia, and immigrated to the United States in 1993 in her mid-twenties. She received a degree in biology in Russia and chose to pursue nursing in the States as it was more practical. Fortunately, “cardiology nursing, specifically intensive care cardiology, sort of became a field that I could be interested in come to find out was pretty good at.” Throughout her career, she has participated in medical trips to Kenya, Armenia, and a refugee camp in Tijuana, Mexico.
Doctors, nurses, and physicians are needed all across the world for various reasons and situations. Dina has traveled across the world helping in a variety of ways. Though this is not something she does regularly, she still will take the opportunity if it presents itself. She traveled to Kenya several years ago with Hearts Around the World, a group of doctors and nurses in cardiology and cardiac surgery. The group’s goal was to teach other physicians new techniques and medical knowledge. Her trip to Armenia was with an informal “teaching slash fact-finding mission just to assess what the needs there are in terms of education.” Though many travel physicians go abroad to teach or help with long-term goals, many other cases involve crisis response. That was the case when Dina traveled to Tijuana. This was during the first months of the Ukrainian war crisis when refugees were passing through the border from Mexico to the United States. Overall, though, Dina says she’s “generally more interested in situations which will have the prolonged effect on people, so not just coming in there and doing surgeries, procedures, helping, you know, pointed patients, but to be teaching people who are there to do things that they weren’t aware of, so they can help hundreds and thousands.”
Travel physicians are quite a big deal across the world, and the level of impact they have has been questioned often. Dina hopes that the doctors and nurses who travel to other countries to help in various ways are making an impact. She says it is especially impactful when people have personal connections to the hospital or situation they’re traveling to. “Really seriously speaking, the groups that focus more on teaching make more sense when they continue for several years…I feel like it is fairly impactful, at least when the physicians and the nurses, if nursing is involved…have a connection to it. In terms of the Kenya trip, for example…one of my coworkers who’s from Kenya used to work in that hospital and trained in that hospital. So he’s attached to people there. And for several years afterward, every time he made a trip there or talked to people there, he would pass on some very warm words from the people that I had the chance to work with, saying that they remember us, that they use the techniques that were offered.”
Being a travel physician can be a very hard and taxing job. For Dina, one of the hardest parts of the position was maintaining professional objectivity. “By the nature of the beast, people are critically ill and dying around you, and you have to maintain this perfect balance between remembering that there is a live person in front of you and not getting too emotionally involved….You’re there for medical and professional support.”
Either alone or with partnered groups, physicians go abroad intending to help in one way or another. Though that begs the question: is there enough? Should more nurses and doctors be going around the world to help? Dina thinks more people should. “There is this unmet need, and I think it’s a very rewarding thing to do for people who travel to those places. And I think the right kind of person can make a fairly profound impact in places where they travel to. So yes, I think that should be more widespread, and I think that, if for nothing else, it does enlighten you and makes you appreciate so much more what we can and cannot do.”
So many physicians now are looking into traveling to provide support and knowledge. Many are beginning to take that journey now as we speak, and a lot of them could use some thoughtful advice. Dina expressed that she did not want to say something “extremely tacky”. “Know what you can and cannot offer because every professional has a certain level of expertise that you can offer and every person has their own limitations. And if you try and offer something that you really are not in a position to offer, you can actually do more harm. So pretty much know what you know, know what you don’t see, and be willing to learn along the way.”
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