Nineteen UCLA students spent the summer providing free medical care and medication supplies to residents in Quito, Ecuador, as part of a global health service trip.

Timmy Global Health, a student-run club, aims to educate students about the challenges surrounding international healthcare. Members attend a weeklong international service trip annually to support communities that lack access to high-quality medical care.

The club holds annual volunteering events during the school year while fundraising for the global health service trip during the summer.

“It was such an amazing trip,” said Sloane Richie, the club’s former chapter president. “I don’t think I’ll ever have anything like that ever again.”

Timmy Global Health partners with Tierra Nueva – an Ecuador-based charity that serves more than 10,000 residents and provides more than $1 million worth of healthcare services annually – to determine which neighborhoods to visit, said Richie, a UCLA alumnus.

“Tierra Nueva, … they know what their community demands,” she said. “It’s three organizations working together – we provide the medicine, the people, the funding. Then Timmy is the middleman between us and Tierra Nueva.”

Upon arriving in Quito, student volunteers set up mobile stations for patients to register, get their vitals taken and access medicine and care from doctors, said Eryn Hong, a club member and fourth-year neuroscience student. The volunteers helped patients in the stations while shadowing the doctors, Hong added.

Timmy Global Health partners with local Ecuadorian medical professionals, allowing students to observe doctors as they work with patients, Hong said. The club provides hard-to-access supplies for local doctors to prescribe, Richie added, including medication for hypertension and diabetes, as well as glasses, eye drops and multivitamins.

“We’re not here to fix an issue – we’re here to enter a community that knows what they need,” Hong said. “We’ll provide that support as much as we can.”

Richie said working in Quito allowed her to see the barriers that patients face beyond the doctor’s office. Some patients did not have thorough medical records, so students had to rely on the limited information patients gave them, said Elle Thompson, the former national representative of Timmy Global Health who helped organize the trip.

Students gain valuable hands-on medical experience through the club that they can apply to their careers, added Thompson, a fourth-year neuroscience and psychobiology student who hopes to attend medical school. She also said members work at various environmental cleanups and service organizations around Los Angeles County when in school, including the Midnight Mission – a shelter on Skid Row.

“It’s really opened my eyes to something I really want to do long term,” Thompson said.