Narrator - Dr. Abel 00:00 Welcome to HelixTalk, an educational podcast for healthcare students and providers, covering real life clinical pearls, professional pharmacy topics and drug therapy discussions. Narrator - ? 00:11 This podcast is provided by pharmacists and faculty members at Rosalind Franklin University, College of Pharmacy. Narrator - Dr. Abel 00:17 This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not professional advice, and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified health care provider. Narrator - ? 00:27 And now on to the show. Speaker 1 00:31 Welcome to HelixTalk. Episode 49 I'm your co host, Dr. Schuman. Speaker 2 00:35 I'm Dr. Patel, and today we're going to talk about something different, nothing clinical, but you can kind of say it's more practice related. And so with that, Dr. Schuman, if you want to introduce the topic of today's episode, Speaker 1 00:48 certainly, and unfortunately, we do not have Dr. Kane with us today. He will be off. So in his absence, we're going to talk a little bit about our inter professional clinics, something that's been going on the school as an opportunity to provide healthcare to a number of individuals, as well as involve a whole lot of the different professional members of the school. Speaker 2 01:08 So with that introduction, I would actually like to go around the table and have the student leaders themselves introduce their names, as well as what college they're contributing from. Speaker 3 01:18 Hi, I'm Nikki. I am one of the clinical affairs officers at the clinic. I am from Chicago Medical School Speaker 4 01:25 Hi, I'm Kayla Weighing. I am a second year physical therapy student, and I am the Archivist of the ICC. Speaker 5 01:32 Hi, I'm Kelsey green. I am also in the CMS program, and I am the Clinical Affairs Officer for medical informatics. Speaker 6 01:42 I'm Jimena Resendiz. I'm from the College of Pharmacy, a third year student, and I am the officer of Multicultural Affairs for the clinic. Speaker 7 01:52 Hello, everyone. I'm Jatin Gumpella. I'm the officer of finance. I'm also a third-year pharmacy student. Hi. Speaker 8 02:00 My name is Rachel Bruckman. I'm a vice president of the clinic student board, and I'm a second year medical student, Speaker 2 02:07 and that's wonderful. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedules and being here. We know that we try to get a lot of different professions and students as much as possible, but the it being summer and students being off on their rotations or scheduled activities they're unable to attend over here. But that being said, what other different professions and students are part of this clinic over here? Speaker 3 02:30 We have virtually almost every clinical program that Rosalind Franklin has to offer represented in our clinic. So we have, as we already saw, CMS, pharmacy, physical therapy, but we also have podiatry. We have the physician assistant program, and there may be others that I'm forgetting, nursing program and our psychology students are also well represented at the clinic. Speaker 2 02:52 Well, that's very good to know. And I'm thinking that the provider representation is pretty much very similar to what the student representation is, correct Absolutely. Speaker 8 03:01 So in order to provide the educational component that the clinic offers, it's kind of crucial that we have providers who also reflect that the programs that the students are coming from. So that way they're able to learn from the professionals in their own departments and in their own field, but also learn from other professions as well. Unknown Speaker 03:19 So where exactly did this all start from? Speaker 8 03:21 Well, the inter professional community clinic started roughly about three years ago or so. Took some time to get up and running, but it served from a group of medical students actually, who wanted to learn more about different professions, but also provide care in the community surrounding Rosalind Franklin University, and they Speaker 3 03:39 pretty much just took it from there, and it's really expanded in the last few years. They've added different positions to the executive officer board that runs the clinic, and our student group, which we call our panel, that helps us run the clinic, has also grown quite a bit, and the number of patients that we're able to see and all of the services that we're able to offer has expanded quite a bit in the last three years, so they've really done a lot in a short period of time. Speaker 8 04:03 And the clinic has definitely grown to be more sophisticated, transitioned over to electronic medical records, which was a very big accomplishment, and gotten steadily more organized over the past couple years. Speaker 2 04:14 And you know what, as a contributor on the faculty, attending side as well, I can kind of attest to that progress as well. I joined the efforts of ICC in their infancy, and I've seen where the clinic was and where it has come and you your hard work and everybody's critical thinking and implementation of different ideas and stuff has brought the clinic where it is today, and we are all very proud of your success. Unknown Speaker 04:39 Thank you very much. That's really nice Speaker 1 04:41 to hear you mentioned some of the services that are offered. Could you go through a few of those that are there for anyone that, again, may not be as familiar with the clinic. Speaker 3 04:50 So we obviously have primary medical care. But on top of that, we also have we offer low cost medications through our dispensary, which is often times where the pharmacy students and faculty come in a lot helping us decide what to discuss. We have lab services. So there's a variety of labs that we can do, both in house and we can send them out to third party labs. We have podiatry services, physical therapy services, Psych Services. We offer vaccinations. And we also, we are working steadily on improving our referral services, so we have a variety of sites where we can refer patients for services that kind of exceed our scope of care at the clinic. Speaker 2 05:30 And some of the examples of those services that we need to refer patients out for would be insulin therapy. Speaker 5 05:37 A lot of our patients are diabetic, and if they are in need of insulin, that is a very tight therapeutic regimen. So typically, our providers aren't able to manage that, and with our patient demographic the biggest issue is follow up, and a lot of our patients aren't necessarily able to follow up with us, since we only operate one night, one Thursday night a week. And so to make sure that they're adequately taking their insulin, we refer them, typically, to a place called Erie Health Center, which is located in Waukegan. Speaker 2 06:13 So Kelsey, you mentioned that you know you guys see this or you run this clinic once a week, and that's for four hours on an average. How many patients do you guys see on a Thursday evening? Speaker 5 06:24 Well, that varies a lot. It depends a lot on our patients, but typically we have six spots dedicated to our patients. If we have one provider that evening, if we have more providers, we will double book, and we will kind of move around the schedule for that week, and we can see up to 10 patients a night. Speaker 6 06:45 Yeah, those are medical patients, but psychology is usually every week is there. And so they see two to three patients every hour. And then Speaker 4 06:54 PT physical therapy sees about nine patients a night, sometimes a couple more if the patients need the care every week, but we also are every week on Thursdays, and we have three hours of bookings instead of four. Speaker 5 07:08 And then podiatry runs sometimes either the second or the third Thursday of the month, and they will see anywhere between. Usually it's between four to six patients an evening. So a Speaker 8 07:21 about two dozen patients or more or less come through the clinic receiving some type of care. And that's not counting the people who do come in just to pick up a prescription or to pick up to get a lab drawn or something like that. Speaker 2 07:34 That's wonderful. I cannot imagine seeing, you know, about two dozen patients in four hours, because in a normal clinic fashion, you know, you the providers will be seeing about 30 patients, you know, at a total eight hour or 10 hour day. So that is incredible. It is incredible. Speaker 1 07:49 So again, talking with all these different health professions here, I was wondering if anyone could tell me, has your opinion, your thoughts changed, for example, about some of the other professions you've gotten to work with? Have you, you know, encountered any biases or stigmas that maybe you've been able to kind of push away from just because you've had that ability to interact with so many different kinds of professions. Speaker 6 08:09 Yeah, so me, personally, I think that I've been downstairs in physical therapy a lot as an interpreter, and I've just noticed how much they learn in the first year of their education that they're literally hands on with the patients making full on progress. And then, in addition just working with med students and everything, I've been on rotations or been on, you know, worked at hospitals before where the pharmacy student or the pharmacist on the team wasn't necessarily seeked out as much as it is here, and that's just the way of teaching at the university. And so I think that transfers over to our clinic, where med students are asking for their pharmacy they're relying on their pharmacy student on the team to tell them, like, what is this medication for? What should we do? Like, what are the side effects? Are these expected side effects that this person should be having with medication. So I think that learning that here in our in our school, and then practicing at our clinic, you take it out to rotation sites, and you're really going to kind of change the way the healthcare team is and include more professions other than just decisions. Speaker 8 09:20 And to add to that, we haven't really talked about it a whole lot, but in our primary Med Service Department, I guess you can say the groups of students that actually see the patients are groups of three students. And we try to keep the students the team inter professional, as interprofessional as possible, so it won't be a group of three medical students, most likely, or a group of three pharmacy students, or group of three podiatry students who are seeing a podiatry patient. More often, you will have a nursing student and maybe a physical therapy student and maybe a physician's assistant student working together. So in my experience, working on one of the I we call them IP teams for interprofessional teams, one of the IP teams, you know, working alongside a nurse. A student from DePaul who I would never, ever, ever, probably cross paths with, but learn how much they actually know and how confident they are in their own clinical skills. And they're able to teach me things because they're a little bit ahead on their in their schedule. So it's a really nice Speaker 5 10:13 collaborative effort. Yeah, and going off of that, I think the greatest part is watching the faculty themselves interact, inter professionally, and how much the care improves once they all work together. Because it's really interesting. You'll have a podiatry appointment that then becomes a medical appointment, which then becomes a psychology appointment, all wrapped into one and that patient kind of gets that complete care in one setting. And I think that, in itself, is amazing, and I think that's what we should all strive for. Speaker 2 10:48 Yeah, and I think progressively, I've seen that once you identify patients needing these diverse services, that you have scheduled patients accordingly. So you know, they're coming into getting their lab strong, while they're waiting for their labs. They're in the medical appointments, and, you know, while they're waiting for their prescriptions to be filled, there have psychology students in the room with them, you know, asking them questions and addressing their concerns and whatnot. So I think it's really great to see this sort of our own unique medical home model that we have come up with at the clinic here. Speaker 1 11:19 Yeah, and to that and then every every profession and every individual there is seen as an asset to the team. It doesn't seem to become as much of that turf battle of, well, I'm going to take care of the patient in my sector, and you're going to take yours, but because everyone is part of it, everyone is feeding in. And then you can seek even go out and seek out others for their for their opinions, even with that team, say, and since patients right there, it's an immediate feedback. And so you immediately see the benefit of a Fido over here, and ask a question over here, I get they get the response, and then I get to hear it too. And so I'm learning a little bit myself about how those professions interact with one another. Speaker 2 11:53 And you literally talk about how many patients you see, you know. And I want to remind the listeners again, if we didn't make it clear earlier, is that the services are completely complementary to patients who cannot afford it. But that being said, can you focus a little bit on what type of patients are we focusing what kind of patient populations are we encountering at this clinic? Speaker 5 12:14 So for the most part, our our patients are all adults. We do not see anyone under the age of 18, but the majority of them are Hispanic or Latino. More than half of them are female and Spanish speaking. This kind of creates a need for Spanish interpreters. Do a little pitch for that right now and then. From last year, what we found our average age is 47.6 our females, we have 61.3% of our patients are female. The most common diagnoses that we get are typically diabetes, hypertension and hyperlipidemia, although Speaker 2 12:53 once in a while you have a day where all you're doing is treating foot problems. Last time, Unknown Speaker 13:01 we're all podiatrists on those days Unknown Speaker 13:03 Absolutely, they definitely shine through. Speaker 1 13:06 So just in an overall, global perspective, what would you say is the vision and the mission of the clinic? Speaker 8 13:12 So the main mission of the clinic is to provide an interprofessional educational opportunity where students can practice their clinical skills and practice interviewing patients, but that also serves greatly to provide services to an underserved community in the Lake County area. Speaker 2 13:28 So with that being said, you guys have a focused vision and mission at the clinic and in the three years of running thus far, what kind of challenges have you guys encountered? Speaker 5 13:41 One of our biggest challenges is the language barrier. A lot of our patients, like I said previously, are Spanish speaking. So in order for them to understand the care that they're receiving, we've had to either translate documents, have a Spanish interpreter available for them, we have to make sure that their medications the instructions are written out in Spanish, which we do through a patient summary card. So there's lots of extra steps in order to ensure that our patients are getting the best possible care. So that is one of the constant needs Speaker 8 14:16 that we have, another big challenge that we talk about all the time, and I'm sure this is true for many free clinics, is a lack of providers just having enough provider support. Because, I mean, providers are incredibly busy. So we're incredibly grateful to you who provide services at ICC and the rest of our providers who provide services, but at the same time, we are always looking for new providers. Are always looking to increase the amount of patients we can see, because we have a very long wait list for at least, you know, three months. So we would like to see our patients sooner, but we're restricted to how much services we can provide. Speaker 2 14:53 And as far as the medical appointments from what I've seen, more providers means more patient appointments. This is what you mean by having. More providers to kind of reduce some of those wait Speaker 8 15:02 times exactly so in a given hour, if we if one provider is going to be able to see two patients in that hour, if we had two providers, we could theoretically see four patients in that same hour, theoretically. But sometimes getting two providers on a single night just again, because of the scheduling constraints and availability is sometimes very difficult. Speaker 4 15:20 And then you did mention one of our other challenges too, is the wait time in clinic. Some of our patients get there at four o'clock in the afternoon for their appointment, but then they don't leave until 637 o'clock at night. And that's partially due to the lack of providers that we have sometimes, because if there is only the one provider in the clinic, then there's the other patients that need to get taken care of as well, so that can kind of back it up. And then sometimes, with that, some of the patients don't know if they're supposed to still be there or if they're supposed to leave, so it's just our we check in with our patients to make sure that they know we're we didn't forget about them, and we're taking care of them. Yeah, I think Speaker 6 15:59 also part of the waiting time is because it is a teaching environment, and so when we are seeing patients, when we're outside of the room, there's a lot of discussion about within the students and then with the provider. So that adds to the wait time, but that's just expected being a teaching environment. Speaker 8 16:18 Another big challenge that we have, and we touched upon this a little bit earlier, is developing a more robust referral system and developing that network where we can send out our patients. Because, like Kelsey said, Our typical patient is a middle aged, Spanish speaking woman, probably with diabetes, but we also have definitely had cases of cervical cancer or potential pancreatic cancer are some various very serious, debilitating disease states, and it's very frustrating having a patient that you care very much about and not have anywhere to send them. So that is definitely a very, very big challenge. And you know, our hearts always break when that happens, but it's something that we're actively working on and trying to fix, and we're always trying to connect with people and find out if there's somewhere where we can send Speaker 1 17:00 our patients. Yeah, I do know from experiences the last couple times I was there, for example, colonoscopies and trying to find somebody to provide it. And there would be certain providers that maybe on a once in every so often, would be able to provide it, but then again, the next time it occurs, you have to find another provider who's willing to do it the next time or the next time. So it's maybe that lack of having a standard if this, then we send them here. And so it's more about who can we find that would provide? Because again, these are services that are being provided either at very low cost or essentially no cost, and so finding somebody who's willing to do that is somewhat difficult. Speaker 8 17:33 Yeah, you have to keep in mind the patient population as well. A lot of them are Spanish speaking. They don't speak English at all, and trying to refer them out to even just a family clinic can sometimes be very intimidating and very scary, or if they have a job that's paying them under the table and they're asking for pay stubs, which may not be a bad thing, but they're trying to gauge how much that patient should be expected to pay for the services they're about to receive. But that sometimes that can scare patients off. So trying to balance between being a medical home and being a medical bridge can sometimes be very big challenge for us. Speaker 2 18:02 Yeah, and, you know, just to give an example, an instance too, that we had a patient present to us, and we did an EKG, which we have, you know, ability to do in the clinic. And I was working with Dr. Goh, one of our providers over here, and we had such a hard time deciding whether we should call an ambulance, because this patient really needs to go to an emergency room and get evaluated, or really have the patient take the risk of going to the emergency room by themselves, because they're going to get a charge for emergency services on their bill. It was really hard, and I can totally see those challenges come through when we are practicing in the clinic. So not so much to focus on the negative. But you know, we talked about how the clinic has come so much further in the past three years. Can you guys highlight some of the successes of the clinic as well? Speaker 6 18:51 Yeah, I think going back to one of the things that we we could improve on, or we have a need for the Spanish services, or I think we've also really greatly improved since we opened, and that just comes from, you know, recruiting from the community for Spanish interpreters. And if anyone's listening, students volunteer with us. So if you speak Spanish or any other language really like it's good to have people like on deck ready to interpret. You never know, as our clinic grows what kind of language services we'll need. But you know, when we started, there was, maybe I don't know, two or three interpreters per week, and now we can have up to six or eight, if we need to, on hand for any given week. So and also, we recently started offering services in Spanish. So we now have psychology students giving Psych services and sessions in Spanish, and we also have providers who speak Spanish, and that's always good, because we're not only providing interpreting services, but we're providing services in their native language, which I think is really common. Speaker 1 20:02 if you think about it from a provider standpoint, sometimes there's this difference between what more the general language would be and what the technical term is. And so if you're using a translator who may not be as aware of some of the technical terms, you try to figure out how's the best way to express this, but you may lose a little bit of it. But if you have somebody who's both adept in the technical terminology and able to convey that in Spanish, because you have that extra asset, Speaker 6 20:24 yeah, and I think that's really that's really great for students to serve as interpreters, because they get to learn. And our organization also provides medical Spanish workshops during the school year where we go over vocabulary that we might encounter in different settings, such as PT or medical encounters, taking a history like any kind of vocabulary that would come up. And so that's really nice, too. Speaker 2 20:51 And if you you know, being here at rods and Franklin diversity is one of our goals and missions of the university as well. So it's very fulfilling to see that you all are also striving to, you know, achieve those missions and visions at the clinic level as well, kind of at transferring the educational value to the practice values as well. Speaker 3 21:13 In that same vein, I think another one of our huge successes is how interprofessional we've become. So there are 13 of us that are on the board of the clinic, and then the group of students that we work with to do all of the functions of the clinic, like the front desk and the people that document our patient encounters. That group of students that I referred to previously our panel is about 80 students, so we have a huge support network, and that is hugely diverse in many ways, particularly in the fact that it is extremely interprofessional. We have, like I said before, almost every program represented in our leadership structure, as well as amongst our volunteers that come in to see patients, and so I think that's a huge success, because we see interprofessionalism Not only actually in the clinic when we see patients, but everything that happens behind the scenes is also interprofessional, from calling patients for to give them their lab results or schedule their appointments or whatever it might be, we have this huge support structure and a lot of interest at Rosalind Franklin, I think that's a huge success over the last several years. Speaker 8 22:12 And I don't know if this necessarily counts as a as a success more or less, but we talked about some of the challenges that we face as a clinic and as an organization. But I think in a lot of ways, those same challenges are what makes ICC such a special opportunity for students to volunteer in because they have the opportunity to learn from multiple professions and feel that frustration when you're invested in a patient and you care about their family, and you have their daughter and you find out, Oh, they might have cancer, or their cancer might be back, or they might be really sick, and how do I help them and see having that frustration and having that ownership over a patient, and having that opportunity to understand that people are walking through very, very different walks of life. They come from very different backgrounds, they have very different circumstances, and I feel like that real world experience is incredibly edifying to any student's education, Speaker 2 23:02 and you kind of went ahead and answered one of our question as to what your gainful experiences have been like. You know, that's shaping you as the young professional that you guys are him. And I know you mentioned earlier about how seeing what's taught at school, doing things at ICC and taking it back to your location sites, and, you know, practicing those values over there. And what you mentioned Rachel about, you know, really taking the ownership of the patient, and what is going to be the fate of the patient, because you're going to be owning a lot of lives when you go out there and practice too. So anybody else wants to share, if any of these experiences that you've gone through at ICC have been life changing, if not life changing, career changing. Speaker 7 23:44 So two years ago, when I first started volunteering at ICC, beginning of pharmacy school, I didn't have much of any experience, to be honest, like I never worked in pharmacy or any clinical experience. So it's really hard. First of all, it's like very difficult for pharmacy students to actually have a clinical experience. And when I first heard about this idea to volunteer, and it's open for all the students, I started volunteering there. And it helps a lot. It helps a lot in the sense of to differentiate between what's like, what actually happens out there, than what, what you can learn from the school about what have, what we learned in the classes, for example, like we have the class, hm, TD, which talks about inter professional and interprofessional and stuff like, it's easy to say, Oh, you have to behave like this, be considerate to other professions. But when you actually start working with, you know, people from different different fields, it's completely different. It grows on you, like you start thinking about how considerate you actually have to be. You know, how other professions think, and it also teaches a lot about how to deal with patients too. It's not easy to get that experience elsewhere as just as a student. I think that's one of the greatest things about ICC, like volunteering ship helps a lot, career wise, and obviously for you know. Community wise, too. Speaker 1 25:01 And I think you bring up a good point, because a lot of times you learn in school, perhaps how to be interprofessional or how to conduct yourself a certain way clinically, and you may go into a practice site that may be done differently, as a site that has maybe a more traditional model of how they do things, and where there's maybe not that ability to work together as much so to have a site where you're not only learning it, but then you go over into the clinic site, and you translate almost perfectly into that setting. It kind of reinforces it there, so that can be encouraging, that what you're learning in school can be translated into that same practice model in your experiences in the future. Speaker 2 25:35 So we talked about some of the successes that the clinic have had. Can you highlight some of the success factors for this improvement of the clinic, it's really Speaker 5 25:44 our students. Our students do such a great job of creating innovative solutions to a lot of our clinics problems. So if we see something, one of the ideas was, we don't know if our patients are getting the full amount of care possible. Why don't we create what's called the patient safety form, and it lists out the patients who are being seen that night, and it kind of goes through their last two appointments, and it's given to our providers so that they kind of have an update of what's going on with each for our patients. Do they need lab results drawn, or labs drawn that evening? Do they need any medications refilled? What medications are they on? When was their last appointment? It gives you all that information on those on those patients for that evening, and that was developed by a student. And so that's a really, really great tool we have at clinic now to ensure that patients are getting the care that they need. And so that was just one of the things. And our students are constantly being very innovative. They say, I see this, this could probably be fixed. I could probably make this better, and they'll do it, and it's wonderful. And so I think that's one of the major aspects that leads to our success. Speaker 3 26:56 I think another one definitely is our providers. As we mentioned, we often lack enough providers, but the ones that we do have are absolutely wonderful, and they've given so much to ICC. And kind of a similar example is recently, the providers have started doing a provider huddle at the beginning of the night where they go over the patients for the night in the different specialties, and kind of discuss what each patient needs. And it's really helped us catch patients that might have otherwise fallen through the cracks. So, for example, maybe a PT patient, we check their chart, and turns out they need a blood draw. And maybe we didn't see that before, and now this patient gets their blood draw done, or maybe they have a consult with the med provider that night because of whatever issue they were having, and it really increases the inter professionalism amongst the providers as well, and in I think, really makes the experience better for our patients and make sure that they're getting the care they need, even if they may not be in that specialty that night, they still get everything they need. Speaker 8 27:55 And sometimes, I think we take this for granted a little bit, but the fact that the the RFU health system now RFU clinics actually let us operate in their offices is incredible, because you look at many other student run clinics across the nation, and they're being run out of churches and they're being run out of community centers, which is completely fine, but being able to have private patient rooms and having a patient waiting area, and having a reception this desk, and having desks for all the students, that's something I feel like we take for granted a little bit, and it's the generosity of our few clinics and the university allowing us to do that is incredible. Speaker 2 28:34 And I couldn't agree more with the three different success factors that you guys have mentioned here. I'd also Speaker 6 28:40 like to add another one, I think that our patients are a big reason why the clinic is a success, only because they have to really trust in us to provide the health care for them, to keep coming back. And if they don't come back, there's no reason for us to be there. They just have to trust and take responsibility, I guess, for their progress, for their for their health. And if that didn't happen, I don't think that we would be successful at all regardless of, you know, student or provider support Speaker 8 29:11 and our interpreters. I don't know how we didn't say that, but, I mean, we wouldn't see more than half the patients that we do see if we didn't have, I mean, students who are volunteering a Thursday evening. They're not even interviewing the patient necessarily. They're facilitating a patient interview. And they're doing that because they want to help. They want to help the community. And that's they're completely invaluable, yeah. Speaker 6 29:32 And we have interpreters that are students here. They're undergrad students from neighboring colleges, and we even have some staff that interprets as well. Speaker 2 29:41 So seems like you have a great force of interpreters going on at the clinic, which is great to hear. Speaker 3 29:47 I think. A couple other things that definitely weren't mentioning are, we've kind of mentioned the RFU clinics already, but they they have meetings with us every other week. They help us in every way to make sure that clinic. Is running effectively, and we have two wonderful ladies that trade off staying with us every Thursday night so that we have someone available in case there's an emergency or we have a question that the we need clinic personnel to answer. So they're incredibly valuable. And also, as everybody knows, running a clinic takes money, especially a free clinic, and so we definitely want to recognize that we've had a lot of donations from the community, and in particular, the dance for diabetes event the last several years has donated their proceeds to us, and that's been huge in terms of helping us run the clinic. We also have a gala every year, so we have fundraising efforts, but we definitely wouldn't be able to function without Speaker 8 30:47 in the discovery dash coming up the recreation center is helping us host. Speaker 2 30:50 So there are a lot of fundraising efforts going on to support the functions that clinic too, which is great. So students who are not physically, they're volunteering, but they're volunteering in manners such as organizing these fundraisers and bringing in the funds and kind of doing the PR for the clinic for participate in the community, which is great. Speaker 1 31:09 So then, other than some of these, the funds needed. What are some other steps, if there's a listener out there, for example, that says, you know, that sounds amazing. How could I get something like this started through my university. I think the most Speaker 7 31:23 important, like Rachel was saying, is that I think facility is, like, a very important factor. Like, you can run it off churches in different places, but the fact that we have a facility and functioning staff through RFU, it's a great help. Like, if any organization or any school can. It's something that they could, they can have it. I think that gives a massive boost to start and the patient population also major fact the need, like the place where you want to start up needs to have that requirement. Those are the two meetings, and obviously more providers and volunteers. Speaker 8 31:59 But I think it's incredibly important that student organization tries to identify faculty in the university, people with the power, let's I mean, to be honest, who have the pull and the network and the connections in the administration to help pull something like this off. Because it's near impossible if you're trying to do it on your own, especially students who may not have experience running a clinic or building the infrastructure for a clinic, you really need to have that advocate on your side, some faculty who are willing to go to bat for you and go to the meetings and really pitch this idea and really support it and provide counsel and help shape the goals of the clinic. So if anyone's thinking about setting up their own free clinic, and that's the first thing I think I would recommend they do, is find out a good like faculty advisor, who will sit with them and help them plan things out and make sure they get, you know, the right partners and the right people who will be working some late nights and donating their free time to help out Speaker 2 32:59 and kind of to give this faculty figure a name. I'm going to quote Dr. Newton. I'm going to use her word, BFF, your best faculty friend. And that's what I think Rachel is talking about. You know, find a faculty that has the outreach, that has the abilities to reach to the people who make decision making powers. And sometimes that's what I feel as a faculty too, is that we've always got a lot on our plate, but it takes that one driven student to keep us on the goal. Keep connecting with us, keep reminding us that, you know, things need to be done and goals need to be reached. Speaker 1 33:33 Okay, so again, it sounds like there's a lot going on at our clinic, and it sounds, again, as you said, there was a lot of these amazing steps that were taken, really, to get this clinic going. So for any listener out there who thinks, let's go ahead, maybe, can I do something smaller? Can I start with something maybe a community interprofessional clinic or a screening? Really, a screening day. If we could start something like that, will be a pearl wisdom you would give that individual that's maybe navigating this experience for the first time. Speaker 8 34:00 I personally think this is, again, just my personal opinion. It's really, really important first to learn about the community you want to outreach to, because you can create the most awesome program ever. But if it doesn't, if it's not going to be received well by that community, then it's completely useless. So before you even plan out. You know, this is what we're offered. This is what our class is going to look like. This is what we're going to teach them. These are the physical therapy moves we want them to do. Learn about the community. First, find out where they hang out, what churches are popular. Do they go to a specific grocery store? Would the grocery store be willing to maybe, like, sponsor some sort of healthy eating event, like things like that? Just learn, take a month or two, just learn about the community and about the people that you're actually going to be affecting, and Speaker 5 34:46 then to go off of that, find a community member that you can partner with. I think you really have to develop that relationship within the community and to make it a community wide event, so that it doesn't feel like. It's just this medical personnel coming in and taking your blood pressure and sending you on your way. It's the entire community. It's your church, it's your so building those relationships with those individuals who run those organizations should also be step one, find out about the community. Step two, make those partnerships Speaker 8 35:19 Absolutely because that's the old adage, right? Like, you know, give a man a fish feed him for a day. Teach a man a fish feed him for a lifetime, kind of thing. And it's great. We're all students will be here for a few years, and then we'll leave. But it's even more impactful if you can go in, build a network, build some connections, and lay down some sort of foundation where that community can help themselves, and also future students can come in and take your place. Speaker 6 35:43 And I would also add, like, the advice of being consistent, don't, I guess, don't jump in there and say, we're going to do a community outreach event and then not have a plan to do it again. You know, if you, if you identify the location and the need, plan something where, you know, maybe start small, like once a month, every Saturday, every last Saturday of every month you're going to be there, so that the community knows that every last Saturday of the month they can find you there, and they can, they can rely on you to for health screening at that place. And that can eventually become something bigger and bigger every time, Speaker 4 36:19 and then going on that too. Don't forget to take the time to reflect on how it went and what you can change to make things better for the next one. Speaker 1 36:26 It sounds so it sounds like your pretty much summary of everything you all are talking about is continuity. Continuity is exactly what it is that you're not going in there, spending a day and creating a vacuum that we we did these great things right? See you later, but you're going in there, finding the change makers in the area, you know, whether it's a local advocate in the organization or some sort of financial support working with them. What is the need? What can we do knowing a little bit more about the area? So you meet them where they are at and then you find a way to reflect and improve upon it for the next group, and make sure to actually that there is a Speaker 8 36:59 next group. Yeah, I think you can. I think it all comes down to empowerment, right? So we're empowering our students to learn. We're empowering our students to connect with their patients. We're empowering our providers and our faculty to be better teachers and to connect with their students and build those relationships. We're also empowering the community to take better care of themselves, to listen and learn and seek out resources. So I like to think that, you know, this isn't really necessarily about our egos as students and what we want to put on our resume. It's really about empowering an entire community. Speaker 3 37:29 And I think more often than not, that continuity is really what the community needs. Because if you're if you're offering a free clinic or you're offering free health screenings, these are if people are coming to those events are coming to that clinic. There's a reason something has happened to them or happened in their life where they have the system has failed them, honestly, and that's why we're here. We want to be the people that are there every week. They can help those people that wouldn't get help anywhere else. And that's really, at the end of the day, I think, why we're all here and why we all keep coming back. Speaker 6 38:00 Yeah, and I think to go off what Rachel said and not doing it, you know, to boost our egos or make our CVs look better, or anything, I think, to do it for selfless reasons, and make sure that you take the time to find that next person who can make take your work and make it better for the next year. Because, like she said, we're not here forever. We're not we're moving on, and sometimes one year, sometimes two years, and if we're lucky, three years, you know, we get to be with the clinic. But eventually our time ends, and we can only we have to take it upon ourselves to find someone and train someone that can not only do what you did, but do more and make them passionate enough, you know, to continue and grow everything Speaker 2 38:48 you know. And you all, you all said that I'm sitting here and listening this, and it's truly inspirational for somebody like me who's been practicing for last four and a half, five years. It is inspirational to see that the students, even despite their busiest schedules possible, you know, as a college of medicine, College of Pharmacy, podiatry, PT, psychology, you guys, are all coming together to address this common cause, the common goal, and strive to provide the best care possible, despite all these challenges and successes that we have mentioned, so it's truly inspirational. Thank you for all you, all you do for our community and for us. Unknown Speaker 39:29 Thank you. Speaker 1 39:31 I mean, we enjoy it, so makes it easier. Well, great again. For those listeners, I hope you've enjoyed being able to hear from a number of our students about some of their experiences on our clinic. For those that haven't done so, please be sure to give us a five star review on iTunes. And with that being said, I think we'll wrap up for now. I'm Dr. Schuman. Speaker 2 39:48 I'm Dr. Patel, and here with us today, we have Kelsey, Jimena, Jordan, Rachel Kayla and Nikki. Thank you very much for your presence. Narrator - Dr. Abel 39:58 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you enjoyed the show, please help us climb the iTunes rankings for medical podcasts by giving us a five star review in the iTunes Store. Search for HelixTalk and place your review there to Narrator - ? 40:11 suggest an episode or contact us. We're online at HelixTalk.com thank you for listening to this episode of HelixTalk. This is an educational production, copyright Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.