The Wound Clinic is an independent mobile clinic based in Tijuana, Mexico focused on providing humanitarian medical assistance to undeserved people irrespective of their socioeconomic status, political and religious affiliations, gender, race, migration status, or substance dependency background based on their needs. Our efforts are guided by medical ethics and the principles of justice, free and universal access to healthcare and peace. How it started In July 2014 while working as director of a research study from UCSD (University of California, San Diego) El Cuete IV based in Tijuana Dr. Patricia Gonzalez-Zuniga found that their studied population PWID, specially the people living in homelessness did not have access to any health care services and suffered from several acute conditions due to infections caused by unattended abscesses on injection sites.
At that time a significant part of El Cuete IV participants were located at the Tijuana canal popularly referred to as El Bordo, based on what she and her staff observed she started a free clinic once a week while the research study kept on going simultaneously on their visits to the canal. During the spring of 2015 a police raid removed all people living in El Bordo at that moment so the Wound Clinic stopped functioning for a few months since the canal was totally swept. A few months after the raid in late June the Wound Clinic resume its efforts to reach out for the underserved only this time the clinic was based in the streets of Tijuana. Ever since June 2015 the clinic has been functioning once every two weeks in the streets of Tijuana where it serves undocumented people, PWID, people living in extreme poverty and homelessness working towards harm reduction and to compensate the damage done by structural violence to the most vulnerable communities of Tijuana.
Our clinic confronts social injustice directly by providing healthcare services to vulnerable populations unable to use Mexico’s universal healthcare system for low-income citizens. We continuously mitigate the damage caused by structural violence upon this underserved population by regaining their trust in healthcare providers and link them to care in order to sustainably improve their quality of life. Now separated from El Cuete IV the Wound Clinic subsists thanks to a binational, multi-lingual, and interdisciplinary volunteer team which consists of physicians, students (i.e. medical, sociology, and global health), psychologists, and peer outreach workers, including people living with HIV. A binational network of volunteers from Tijuana, La Casa del Centro , (UABC, Universidad Xochicalco, Valle de las Palmas (UABC), California (UCSD, UCLA, USD, SDSU, Stanford), and donors who ensure a constant, yet limited, amount of pharmaceuticals and sterile wound care supplies. Our Principles The Wound Clinic principles of dignity, justice, free access to healthcare and peace reinforce our aims to ensure healthcare equity by empowering underserved populations to address personal health issues in a safe and non-judgmental environment free-of-charge.
Our team of volunteers strongly disagrees with the replication of the categorization of patients according to their backgrounds, neutrality and equality are key for us to provide services where the poor have been forgotten. Our Mission Sensitize and raise awareness among the local and international community about the implications of structural violence in Tijuana’s society specially the poor and underserved. We aim to provide a safe space where regardless of their personal backgrounds, barriers to access quality healthcare are nonexistent giving everyone the chance to improve their life’s and therefore cause a positive impact on their immediate environment. The Wound Clinic visualizes healthcare as a universal need that should be granted a so to all individuals. We aim to reach for those who have been forgotten and left out by barriers to access health care and bring back dignity to people who have become victims of stigmatization and discrimination.
