“Understand the role of disease prevention and health promotion in relation to individual patients and/or patient population and utilize these principles in clinical encounters”
My exposure to medicine through these four years has been spread across the spectrum of time that patients would interact with the health system: family health visits, health coaching, ED visits, in-patient service, pre-operative, post-operative, and even post-mortem. However, there was only one experience through medical school in which I felt I was able to reach patients in the community as a whole population. This experience was my Community Health Project during my second year.
I teamed up with students from my Longitudinal Group, and we were paired with Godman Guild House. This association serves the community through two main areas: Youth and Family Education and Workforce Development. After assessing the needs of the community with the staff, our project focused on assisting community members with limited internet and computer access to better keep and organize their relevant medical information. The objective was to create a binder for people to write out and retain documents on different categories such as past medical history, medications, physician contact information, appointment history, and several others. Our project involved designing the physical binder for the patients to fill out their medical information, cheaply producing them in bulk, distributive them as the Godman Guild Health Fair, and followed up with questionnaires to receive feedback on ways we could improve the efficacy of the binders. Working with Godman Guild House was a positive experience overall, and our liaisons from the Godman Guild were very enthusiastic about this project. This project has the potential to improve a vulnerable community’s ability to keep track of their personal medical information without needing to access an electronic device. Here are the pages that filled the binder we distributed: CHE Medical Binder V2. In the months following the distribution, we were able to present our findings and assess our success with our poster presentation. We divided the creation of the poster and its individual tasks evenly throughout the course of the project. Our collective work can be seen here: Group 21-Poster Submission-1
Having this project early in medical school was valuable in terms of gaining perspective on social determinants of health before having significant opportunities to see patients in clinic. In reflecting on this experience, I don’t think I appreciated the value of this project in the moment as much as I do now. Yes, the binder was cheap and flimsy and many people may have quickly discarded it, but it serves a more subtle but important purpose – to give the community more responsibility and initiative in their own health care and personal knowledge. As I’ve progressed through clinical rotations, I’ve ran into many patients who couldn’t report their medical history or medications and simply tell me to “look it up in the computer”. This ignorance of their own health care could be dangerous if they are involved in care outside of their electronic health network, and it certainly limits their ability to catch any mistakes in their record or medications if any came up. Overall, I think the message of distributing a health binder and its importance is more impactful to me than the binder itself.
I hope through residency that I can put myself in more situations like this to recognize opportunities to prevent disease and promote health through patient education. I think most applicably to my immediate future in my neurology residency will be counseling stroke patients on risk factors and preventative measures to avoid future neurovascular events. No matter how much effort is put into the management of in-patients, long-term outpatient care will fail if patients aren’t educated in their diseases and take responsibility for their wellbeing. It can be very difficulty to make the time on in-patient services for patient education before discharge, but I plan to make that a priority in my future. Saving lives isn’t always as action-packed as intubating and providing CPR, but it can be as simple as distributing this paper binder.