St. Vincent Charity Medical Center resident returns to India on medical mission

Friday, April 15, 2016

Tags: St. Vincent Charity Medical Center , health care

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St. Vincent Charity Medical Center internal medicine resident Ramyashree Tummala, M.D., recently went back home to India on a medical mission. She said she saw the mission as “a wonderful opportunity to serve the people of my country with the knowledge and skills from the training that I got in the United States.”

“I’m very proud of my country, and that’s why I will always seek any opportunity to give anything back to my country and to my people,” she continued.

The mission lasted for a week and took the 25-year-old Dr. Tummala and 15 other volunteer doctors from Ohio to the rural east of the state of Gujarat, located in the tribal belt of India’s westernmost state. The mission, now in its 16th year, goes to a different region of India every year.

Dr. Tummala, who originally hails from southern India’s Hyderabad, personally treated more than 400 patients this year, and the mission as a whole treated 4,000 patients across 10 villages.

Dr. Tummala explained that in this region villagers don’t have easy access to doctors, often having their injuries and illnesses tended to instead by a “bhagat,” or traditional healer. “I’ve seen how difficult it is for certain patients to get to a hospital when they are sick—I’m very surprised that they’re living with such pain and they have never gone to a doctor.”

To see a video documenting Dr. Tummala’s mission to India, click here.

St. Vincent Charity Medical Center is a ministry of the Sisters of Charity Health System.