Floating Doctors 2010-2011 Medical Relief Expedition

Floating Doctors is an all-volunteer, 501(c)3 non-profit medical relief team dedicated to reducing the present and future burden of disease in the developing world.

Since May of 2010, a dedicated permanent crew and many visiting volunteers have voyaged from Haiti to Panama along the Atlantic coast of Central America on a medical mission to provide supplies and assistance to existing relief groups, and to carry health services to remote locations that are cut off from care.  We are highly mobile and agile, able to access and serve with effective efficiency.

Floating Doctors works with local officials, relief groups and community leaders to identify and address specific needs in communities. Whether we are doing mobile clinics for remote island communities,  providing advanced life support training for the fire department on Roatan, lending hands and the expertise of our volunteers in local clinics on Bocas del Toro, coordinating and delivering supply shipments from international donors to local groups, or even transporting 12,000 pounds of lumber and material to Haiti and building two schools, Floating Doctors is about leaving the biggest possible, longest-term health benefits for the lowest expenditure of resources.

Floating Doctors is a globally-mobile medical team, utilizing a green energy platform—the expedition sailboat Southern Wind—to deliver medical relief to thousands of people in the most remote coastal areas of the world.

We practice with an emphasis on clinical diagnosis combined with new, portable diagnostic technology, including our Hemocue, iStat and Sonosite Portable Ultrasound from International Aid. We teach preventative medicine with an emphasis on empowering our patients to take responsibility for their personal health care. Floating Doctors  and SS Southern Wind strive to leave a small carbon footprint, and long-lasting health benefits in her wake.

Floating Doctors face constant challenges both at sea and onshore working to implement health solutions.  Only through the support of so many people in the destinations visited, our partners (especially Direct Relief International, Abbott Laboratories, and Rotary clubs worldwide) and our generous followers online who support us, has the dream been made possible.

Sometimes people refer to a person who has been helped as ‘only one person.’  The world is filled with individual people, counted only as a number on any sheet of statistics.

Floating Doctors is about remembering that each lone, individual person is a whole world to the people they love and live among, and about treating each individual person as though they were our world.

We hope you enjoy following our voyage online, and hope you will get involved to help expand and continue our mission.