La Casa El Buen Samaratino is located in Southwest Houston. Casa is the only clinic in Houston that provides 100% free services to patients who are uninsured and low-income. In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, the clinic has been stretched thin with staff working many extra hours with outdated or few resources.
The Casa team doesn’t have all the equipment they need. For some equipment they have just a single item that must be sterilized between patients, a process that takes 24 hours. That means they can only do certain procedures once each day – even if they have multiple patients who need it.
The team at Casa is working so hard, we wanted to do something that would help them in their work. So we decided to update their equipment and get them more of the supplies they need. And we decided to focus on women’s health. Casa has gynecologists on staff, and they do a lot of screenings for cervical cancer. With their current equipment they can only do one biopsy per day for cervical cancer, which means women either must be referred elsewhere where they’ll likely have to pay or come back another day for the procedure.
So, we bought the equipment Casa needed to be able to do 3 biopsies per day – tripling the number of patients they can see – as well as some other tools to help Casa’s gynecologists serve their patients more effectively.
“It’s like Christmas! We all get a box [to open],” exclaimed Joy, who works on staff at Casa. “It’s amazing to think how much these small tools dictate how many patients we can serve. We’ll now be able to do 3 patients in one day. It’s really, really meaningful.”
