Volunteering in Nha Trang, Vietnam: Senior Medical Students’ Perspectives of a Surgical Mission Trip

Vietnam has had a long history of international mission teams that volunteer needed surgical care to underserved populations for various medical problems. As senior medical students, we joined a non-profit organization’s surgical mission trip led by a community practice surgeon and staffed by 32 health care professionals to provide cleft lip and palate reconstructions for 75 patients at a local hospital in Nha Trang, Vietnam. As a surgical mission team in a resource-poor country, we intended to fill gaps and unmet areas of need by offering care that patients would otherwise not receive. But in doing so, we encountered other gaps in health care for which we did not have adequate preparation or solutions: insufficient primary care, lack of understanding of others’ cultural contexts, absence of knowledge of patients’ socioeconomic contexts, and problems in other countries’ health care systems. Although the purpose of our mission was to provide a specific service, we felt it is important to examine the service in the context of these broader issues. We considered these concerns from two different perspectives: what a medical mission gives and what it does not. In this article, we present several issues that our medical mission confronted and how they were both addressed and overlooked.