Free Medical Clinics for Belize City Residents

A medical mission from the U.S. is in the city providing a host of medical services to residents. The Louisiana and South Carolina Volunteering Mission is operating at the Wesley Upper School where persons have had the opportunity to check up on their health concerns ranging from dental hygiene to reading glasses. Today, their services diverted to manual work to improve the school building and compound. News Five’s Duane Moody reports.

Duane Moody, Reporting

Belize City residents, primarily those in the Queen Square Division on south side have been able to get free medical services at the Wesley Upper School on Dolphin Street. That’s because a mission from the U.S. is in country providing medical care and assisting with the construction of a perimeter fence at the school grounds. The team has culminated its vacation bible school classes and since Monday, has been holding free clinics at the institution.

Nicole Welch Middleton

Nicole Welch Middleton, Principal, Wesley Upper School

“Our school is situated in the middle and then there is gang rivalry on both sides so our compound isn’t really safe. So this is very important to us because the team that is visiting at this moment, they are helping to work on the fence as well as doing the free clinic; they are painting some classrooms and helping us to get ready for the new school year and helping us run a two-day VBS for children—not only from our school, but from the community as well.”

The visiting group is from the Louisiana and South Carolina Volunteering Mission, a Methodist Church organization that does free medical clinics, a dental hygiene clinic and a reading glasses clinic. Aside from nurse practitioners and emergency medical personnel, there is also a neurosurgeon in the mix.

Beverley Dinnel

Beverley Dinnel, Team Leader, Louisiana and South Carolina Volunteering Mission

“We are treating everybody that comes in the door and seeing what they need and want we can do to help them. Everybody gets vitamins and depending on what the doctors determine, they get other medication and it is all free.”

Duane Moody

“How is this made possible?”

Beverley Dinnel

“All the different churches that we serve in the United States get together and help us fund this and then we fund our own way here.”

Duane Moody

“The medication and everything too is sponsored?”

Beverley Dinnel

“We do fundraisers to purchase the medications so that we can bring it down as free to the people that need it.”

Neurological surgeon Doctor Horace Mitchell departed from his specialty to evaluate the patients medically by providing primary care services in general medicine. Doctor Mitchell says that overall Belizeans are very healthy, but there were some urgent cases with diabetic and hypertensive patients.

Horace Mitchell

Doctor Horace Mitchell, Neurological Surgeon

“Most of the patients we find here are in extremely good health. They have very good dental care, very good medicine care and preventing disease. What we are seeing is just a lack of specialty care. Like the specialty management of diabetes, the specialty management of hypertension. I saw one gentleman today who had a stroke and the stroke was six weeks ago and he still have not yet seen a neurologist. So it is really just tertiary care specialist which is not unlike any other areas that we go to. But overall Belizeans are very healthy.”

Principal Nicole Welch Middleton says that the residents from the immediate community have been making the best of the free clinics and coming to the clinic on a daily basis for checkup. But while the mission has the capacity to accommodate up to one hundred and fifty persons per day, Middleton says that in day-three, they have only seen about two hundred persons. She encourages everyone to come out and get checked.

Nicole Welch Middleton

“Since Monday, we have seen over two hundred patients already, but with the amount of supplies and everything that the team brought with them, we can see five times that more. So we really want to appeal to Belizeans, to anybody who needs to see a doctor, to come out and to visit the clinic. Our hours are nine to three-thirty from Monday to Friday; this Friday. And they work right through twelve and one, so if you are working and you get a break at that time, you can still come and we will process you as quick as possible.”

Duane Moody for News Five.