Crossroad Health Center Pediatrics

Catherine Jin, Summer 2011

My experience this summer at Crossroad Pediatrics West has truly been eye-opening for me. Through my daily responsibilities, ranging from weighing newborns for their first checkups to preparing teenagers for their yearly physicals, I thoroughly enjoyed working with children of all ages. One of the most valuable lessons I gained from this internship was simply learning to better understand patients and parents who come from backgrounds that sharply contrasted with what I was familiar and comfortable with. Seeing the struggles these families face every day was both heartbreaking and encouraging for me. One of the most striking issues for me was the need for education regarding basic health facts and the lack of health literacy in this population. The goal of my project this summer was to target both parents and patients of all ages and provide them with this basic information in hopes of both educating and provoking questions they might have for the physician.

Another striking pattern in this population is that many of our patients are overweight or obese. In fact, early 40% of the patients at this clinic ages 2-18 are considered overweight or obese. One of our clinic's goals was to reach out and become more involved within the community, so the staff decided to become coaches for their own team for Girls on the Run, a 12-week program that is targeted toward pre-adolescent girls ages 8-13. The goals of this program include encouraging positive emotional, social, mental, spiritual, and physical development while training for a 5K running event. After interviewing many fitness venues, I was able to find a site that was willing to allow us to use their facilities to coach our team at Dunham Recreation Center.

One of my initial goals during this internship was to better understand the underprivileged communities within Cincinnati and to get a better feel for what our patients living in these circumstances deal with on a daily basis. I was able to do so by shadowing at various health care facilities in the area, including the Price Hill WIC center and the Liberty campus ED. Through shadowing a dietician offering nutrition advice and grocery vouchers to mothers in need and observing patients come and go in the ED, I was able to get a better feel for how to best interact with and serve these populations with understanding and compassion rather than judgment.

Overall, I found my summer experience to be both enjoyable and educational. Through the past eight weeks, I have learned the most effective ways to interact with children and understand parents that are from underprivileged backgrounds. My experiences here have taught me to be more understanding of poverty, why people resort to the things they do, and how to best educate patients. My experiences with UHP have given me incredibly valuable lessons that will both motivate me now in my studies and benefit me in the future in becoming an effective physician for all populations.