Good Samaritan Free Health Center

Julie Luna, Summer 2017

The GSFHC serves adults who are ineligible for any type of health insurance and are residents of Hamilton County. My summer as an intern at the Good Samaritan Free Health Center (GSFHC) allowed me to experience the “behind the scenes“ of healthcare. I believe this is great because most doctors don’t have any idea of how some patients have to go through a very hard process before seeing them. This experience opened my eyes to various situations I will probably never see again in my training. I was able to see my future job from a different perspective and understand how valuable it is to work as a team member in this profession in order to give the patient the best possible care.

As an intern, I served as receptionist, community health worker, translator, appointment coordinator and much more. Being able to rotate between responsibilities at the clinic taught me invaluable lessons. One of the most valuable lessons to me was to understand why patients struggle with compliance, which is a huge topic during most of our lectures but is never explained from the patient’s perspective. The GSFHC provided a wide range of examples as to why patients aren’t compliant and also allowed me to see how to come up with programs that seek solving this problem instead of condemning the patient. I was able to help the GSFHC develop an educative program for their diabetic patients that was targeted towards the high no-show appointment rate. The Trifecta Project consisted on scheduling patients on a 3-in-1 appointments in one afternoon. During 90 minutes patients talk to a dietitian, a counselor and a pharmacist for 30 minutes each about issues related to their diabetes management. This 3-in-1 approach seeks to allow the patient to understand their disease, be helped with some of the barriers and become as informed as possible in order to reach a controlled status and live a better life.

Developing an inter-professional project with volunteer healthcare professionals was a great challenge but I am sure many patients and their families will benefit from it and I look forward to going back periodically to analyze the success of my hard work. That being said, I should also mention how much I learned from every single person that works or volunteers at the GSFHC. The work atmosphere experienced there is like no other place because everyone is there merely because they want to help the less fortunate and make a difference. This is another incomparable experience I take from this summer. The lives and stories of the people I worked along and of the patients helped will forever stay with me and I am sure they have and will keep shaping me as a future doctor. I can confidently say working at the GSFHC this summer has changed me as an individual, has reminded me of the reason I started this journey and has provided a great groundwork on which I will keep training to become a great physician.