History
In 2005, during his first year at UCLA Dental School, Patel decided to travel to Brazil to provide dental services to underserved communities. But he encountered difficulties in finding volunteer opportunities, having contacted more than 15 Brazilian organizations and receiving no response. He found that other dental and medical students had experienced similar problems. To address this problem, Patel created the Dental Volunteer and later HealthCare Volunteer to help connect students with volunteer opportunities. During Dental school, Neilesh Patel said he spent many “pizza nights” – subsisting on pizza and pulling all-nighters teaching himself how to program and build a Web site, which became the backbone of HealthCare Volunteer. He said he was driven by the belief that all qualified applicants should have the opportunity to volunteer. Soon now-orthopedic surgeon Elliot Mendelosohn, also a biomedical engineering major in his undergraduate days, joined Patel to help build HealthCare Volunteer.
Founded by Neilesh Patel DDS, and Elliot Mendelsohn MD in November, 2005, HealthCare Volunteer has a large listing of health-related volunteering opportunities serving the non-profit sector. Volunteers include physicians, dentists, medical students, and dental assistants, who donate their time to provide services including free surgery and dental care. The organization has direct patient care programs in over 10 countries including India, Ecuador, Kenya, Tanzania, Liberia, Cameroon and Paraguay. In 2007, Patel was selected as a YouthActionNet Fellow in recognition of the organization's efforts, which was awarded at the Embassy of Finland in Washington DC. In 2008, Patel was awarded the UCLA Charles E Young Humanitarian Award for his work in global health. Patel reportedly dropped out of the UCLA MBA Program in 2007 after starting classes his first quarter as the first ever student in the integrated DDS/MBA program in order to focus on HV's growth.
Patel and Mendelsohn have also established HealthCare Tourism International, the first non profit medical tourism accreditation service. Patel started his first non-profit StudentsHelp.org (www.studentshelp.org) at age 17, which helped provide computer services and technical support to needy people around the world.
Read more about this topic: Health Care Volunteer
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