Crossroad Health Center Pediatrics

Christina Lee, Summer 2016

During my time at Crossroad Health Center (West), I was able to work on a variety of skills. Despite being located at West, I collaborated with two of my peers who were at the OTR location, as well as the Care Coordinators (comprised of graduate students of various health-related degrees). By working together, we were able to call hundreds of patients to help schedule appointments to visit their primary care provider or to a specialist (with an appropriate referral), and request medication refills. In addition, we called patients based on their current health status (e.g. if they had high risk hypertension, severe uncontrolled asthma, high risk diabetes, etc.) to assess their overall health, management of their condition, and barriers they faced when trying to treat their illness. We then scheduled these patients with their PCP based on their individual doctor’s recommendations as well as their current circumstances (for instance, if they visited the emergency department a few days ago and required a follow-up). Most of these patients—who are on Medicaid, have other insurances, or have no insurance—would not receive or even seek help otherwise if not for our outreach calls because of the complexities of the relationship between the healthcare system and underserved communities.

Of our activities, the more exciting ones included setting up and participating in health fairs. We were able to engage directly with the community to educate people about asthma, diabetes, hypertension, healthy eating, and provide fun activities for all families. We reached out to hundreds of adults and children, and we were able to collect the contact information of people who were interested seeing Crossroad providers. In addition to the fair that we held, we also participated in health fairs held by other organizations. Our booth focused on providing information about diabetes (its prevention, treatment, and maintenance), as well as offering blood pressure checks for individuals who were interested. By helping some of these people realize that they could have hypertension and that they really needed to establish a stable relationship with a PCP, we were able to direct these people who had uncontrolled high blood pressure towards some of our providers.

Crossroad also provided several training sessions for its providers and anyone on the team who was interested. These included mental health training, an introduction to motivational interviewing, and a diabetes trainer course. Having taken the former two courses, I feel that these were good ways to introduce people working in healthcare (who are not necessarily physicians) to useful skills.

Overall, Crossroad has given me insight on which populations suffer most from our current healthcare system, and what we can do to help once we become physicians. It is our duty to use our skills to help those in need and to improve the human condition because everyone deserves good health. It was a privilege and an honor to work amongst physicians, employees, and volunteers who invested themselves fully in providing the best care possible to anyone who walks through Crossroad’s doors.