In 1999, the PBS program La Plaza produced 'Doctors for Two Worlds,' a documentary which profiled a student as she progressed through the intensive Spanish course and her subsequent clerkship in Guatemala. Students can travel to Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Guatemala or Puerto Rico for their clerkship, Some of these sites send their medical students to HMS, as well, where they work with their American counterparts in Boston hospitals and help each other with cultural and language issues. In Guatemala, the Universidad Francisco de Marroquin operates a health clinic where students from HMS work alongside their Guatemalan colleagues, who are newly graduated doctors. Supervision from senior physicians is limited, and some of the population speak only the native indigenous Cakchiquel. The foundation supports an 80-bed hospital in La Paz and satellite clinics in the surrounding barrios.
Students divide their time between the hospital and clinics.
What is even more rewarding is that most of them are now resources for Latinos in the community. He is pleased that he can refer his patients at the clinic to former students practicing in the area. One of his biggest challenges at the clinic is space, physical and temporal. Because they see more and more patients, he and his associates would like to expand, but don't have the space or the resources to do so. Byrne and Rodriguez echo his frustration.