As part of his Global Health Scholarly Concentration, Thomas Graves traveled to Iquitos, Peru, a city in the Amazon Jungle, where he lived on a medical boat for a month serving communities along the Amazon River. Each morning, the team sailed to different villages and began the day by visiting schools to teach topics such as cleaning water, dental hygiene, and preventative health.
Morning clinics were then held on the boat, where patients presented with both tropical diseases like malaria and dengue, as well as common conditions such as hypertension and back pain from farming. Thomas also assisted with interpreting, which allowed him to connect more closely with patients and build meaningful relationships. One especially memorable experience involved kayaking down a smaller river and hiking through the jungle to reach a homebound patient who otherwise would not have received care.
In the evenings, the team would hike through the jungle to see the wide variety of wildlife and plants, and visit the villages to play soccer and share meals with the communities.
During this time, Thomas worked with physicians from Peru, South Africa, and England and learned about the challenges of providing healthcare in resource-limited settings, including reliance on physical exams when laboratory testing was unavailable and the financial barriers patients face when living in isolated areas of the jungle. He also spent an additional month at the regional hospital in Iquitos, rotating through trauma, OB/GYN, infectious disease, and oncology. There, he encountered severe manifestation of diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and dengue, as well as trauma from river accidents and burns from the frequent gas-related explosions that happened on the floating river gas stations.
In addition to patient care, Thomas worked on a project aimed at improving the medical boat’s newly adopted EMR system, designed to function offline and sync with a main database every few weeks due to the lack of internet access on the river.
He surveyed both patients and providers to assess satisfaction with the system and identified areas for improvement. This work, titled Patient and Provider Satisfaction with EMR Systems for Medical Boats Serving Communities Along the Amazon River, was later presented as an oral presentation in Taipei, Taiwan, and published as a manuscript. The experience combined clinical service, teaching, and research while reinforcing his long-term commitment to advancing healthcare delivery in underserved populations worldwide.
Please review his recently published article at the link below: