Center for Ministry Formation

Stewarding Care Across Borders

The team at Mercy Health St. Vincent are used to providing care for those in most need. Only on this day, when a victim of a high-speed motor vehicle collision was transported to our ED, it was different. 

For this young man from Mexico, no family could be found. As the patient fought to recover from a traumatic brain injury, our Chaplains and Case Managers struggled for weeks to find a contact and surrogate decision-maker. 

With the help of the Mexican consulate, our team eventually located the patient’s family only to find out that there were no interpreter services for Tojol-ab'al, the Mayan dialect spoken by the patient and family. Further, the family lived in a rural area with little cell coverage; texting was possible only over WhatsApp, but a phone conversation was nearly impossible because it required the family to journey miles to the nearest town with internet service where, even then, conversations were dropped because of the unreliable wi-fi.  

Three weeks after arrival, the patient was medically stable for discharge to a facility, but communication with his family was still piecemeal. Because undocumented immigrants have been excluded from many of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, this patient was uninsured, and no post-acute facility would accept him. 

Many hospitals faced with the long-term care of such patients work to repatriate them to the country of their birth so as to mitigate costs. Unfortunately, however, they often fail in the process to secure adequate support for all dimensions of the patient’s ongoing welfare, including social support and environmental concerns necessary for optimal medical care. 

Bolstered by our Mission, however, our teams optimized the care that this patient received even as we continued to attempt to provide updates to the family and to ensure caring connections were in place for our patient once he left our facility. Our commitment to the judicious use of resources had to be balanced with our commitment to upholding the dignity of the patient in our care. 

Members of the trauma team pinned photos of the patient’s hometown on the wall and the nursing staff played the Spanish radio station. For our team, this was not an abstract patient, but a particular person with a name and a story.

Four months after arrival, and with support from our Director of Case Management, Chief Medical Officer, and with the system support of our Director of Global Ministries, our team managed to reach a local Catholic clinic near the patient’s hometown. 

The hospital administrator was a religious sister, committed to the case. With the support of what came to be an expression of global Catholic healthcare ministry, we bridged the Tojol-ab'al language barrier and reached the patient’s parents who asked if we could help to reunite them in Mexico. 

After doing our medical due diligence to ensure appropriate care could be provided, the system Global Ministries and Ethics leads worked with an international repatriation transport company to fly the patient to Mexico with an accompanying nurse where he was received by the local clinic and was later discharged under the care of his family. Since his return home, the patient’s neurological status has continued to improve.