LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Students and faculty from Bellarmine University went on a trip to the Dominican Republic to help young people there get basic health care needs. But to their surprise, it turns out their medical skills were needed most on the plane ride home.

Bellarmine’s Athletic Training and Family Nurse Practitioner programs teamed up with Louisville-based nonprofit Go Ministries to send three faculty members and five students to Santiago de los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic. While there, they offered free sports physicals to some 100 young athletes, many of whom hope to play collegiate sports in the U.S. someday.

“To be able to take what Bellarmine has gifted us as far as education and resources and to be able to take it down there, it’s very special. It means a lot to be able to share in that way,” said athletic training professor Dr. Chelsey Franz.

Dr. Franz said, for many of the young people they served, this was their first sports physical. While providing health care needs was the basis of the trip, they did other things while they were there as well, such as painting houses in a nearby neighborhood and immersing themselves with the people and culture.

After a long week of hard work and fun, it was time to head home. Dr. Carol Smith, a professor with the School of Nursing, said she had just gotten settled in on the plane ride home and started a movie when she heard an overhead page that someone needed medical care.

“No one was really getting up that I saw, so I went to the front of the plane,” said Dr. Smith.

The other nursing professor on the trip, Leslie Leffler, followed her.

“The flight attendants were definitely frantic. By the time Dr. Smith and I made it over to the person who was having the medical emergency, she was actually slumped over in her chair and unconscious,” said Leffler.

They were unsure why the Dominican woman was unconscious, so a firefighter who was on the plane helped them move her to first class where they could lay her down to assess her condition. They were up in the air, working with limited resources and navigating through a language barrier.

“Just to keep a cool head, work with what you have and pray. We did a lot of praying during that,” said Dr. Smith.

They kept the woman stable through the plane making an emergency landing, so the woman could get to a hospital for treatment.

“Dr. Smith and I have decades of nursing experience. We still practice clinically as nurses and nurse practitioners. We were able to transfer that knowledge to help a patient immediately who was critically ill,” said Leffler.

While it was a stressful situation, it served as a real-life learning lesson for students.

“Our students were able to witness that to a certain degree, but we could certainly go through and talk about our critical thinking skills and decision making, which is an essential part of being a nurse,” said Leffler.

The faculty members are planning to take another group of students on a similar trip next spring.