For the first time, in spring 2013, several students and faculty from the School of Health Technology and Management at Stony Brook University traveled to Meru, Kenya, a town located on the eastern slope of Mount Kenya, 108 miles northeast of Nairobi and 5 miles north of the Equator. They were part of an educational and medical team and sought to build a relationship between the Kenya Methodist University (KeMU) medical school and Stony Brook University. As a result of this trip, a memorandum of understanding was agreed upon between the Universities. In March 2014, two PA students and one faculty member completed another medical mission to Kenya. They spent most of their two weeks there in Nkubu Consolata Mission Hospital, a small private hospital. The hospital has an emergency department, two operating theaters, a laboratory and multiple inpatient wards for adults and pediatrics. It also has a large outpatient clinic that provides prenatal care and family medicine services, and a separate HIV/AIDS clinic. The students learned that much of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Kenya stems from the stigma of the disease. While Kenyan people may acknowledge their disease, it is not socially acceptable for an individual to notify their past or present partners of their HIV status. Cultural barriers, not educational ones, foster the spread of the disease despite quality HIV/AIDS care. Consolata Hospital has a very comprehensive HIV/AIDS program that has grown from the Clinton administration and Clinton Foundation's push for global comprehensive HIV/AIDS care. Students worked one-on-one with local physicians and clinical officers to provide care to many people who hadn't seen a doctor in years. Kenya's clinical officers are equivalent to our physician assistants, a program that originated many years before the PA profession. For the first time, students were able to see patients independently. However, they had to overcome many challenges, such as language barriers and the approach to healthcare. The students felt compelled to help all of the patients in some way, for many traveled hours just to spend 10 minutes talking to somebody who could help them. Even if patients were sent away with reassurance and needed little medical intervention, they were unbelievably gracious and grateful. It was incredibly rewarding for the students. When the students returned, two students, Dana Morgan and Emily Berganini, gave a presentation to their class. During the presentation, they said that the two weeks spent in Kenya "are beyond the capacity of words to describe. "It is very cliché to speak of a medical mission as "eye-opening" or "life-changing," but those are the words the students used. They "learned so much and saw so much in a very short period of time, but those experiences will affect the way they practice medicine forever." "As students, we are trained to take a thorough history and perform a detailed physical to support if not arrive at a diagnosis, and these principles were made evidently clear after working with clinicians in Meru. "The students felt that the medical mission to Kenya served as one of their founding lessons for a life of learning and serving.

In spring 2013, first-year PA students traveled to Chacraseca, Nicaragua, an isolated town with a population of 8,000. A single medical clinic with a lone full-time physician and a handful of nurses and support staff provides medical care to the entire population. With so few staff and severely limited supplies, even the most basic of medical care is a luxury to the community. In March 2014, eight first-year Stony Brook PA students loaded with donated medications and other medical supplies spent five days working at the same clinic, providing much-needed primary care services. The students raised the funds for the trip through fund raises and donations.  With the guidance of three program alumni, the students were able to help assess, diagnose and treat patients of all ages, who presented with all manner of maladies ranging from strep throat to urinary tract infections. Given the high incidence of patients with underdiagnosed diabetes in the region, the team also provided diabetes screening and education to every patient visiting the clinic. The students also visited local schools in Chacraseca, teaching young students about the importance of proper hand washing and oral health. On other days, they swapped their stethoscopes for shovels and helped build a house for a local family. The first year class student has continued to travel to Nicaragua each year since 2013