Welcome House of Northern Kentucky

Ashley Ivkovich, Summer 2010

The Welcome House shelter in an emergency shelter providing temporary housing to homeless women and children in the Northern Kentucky area. When a woman enters the shelter, she is paired with a case manager who establishes her a program in order to find that woman an income, housing, and a support network. The shelter also provides all the basic needs these women and children while they are staying there ranging from three meals a day to resume workshops. Women are usually at the shelter two to three months in order to get their lives back on track, but in the meantime the Welcome House Shelter serves as home and a great resource to all of it's residents.

At the shelter my main job was to provide the residents with weekly educational programs. I arranged one adult and one childrens educational program each week. The adult programs ranged from breast and cervical cancer awareness to exercise classes to ways to help deal with stress. The children's programs usually centered around handwashing or teeth brushing and also served as a time for the mothers to have an hour or two break from the demanding job of motherhood. Also one day a week I structured an hour long informal discussion about a topic of the residents choice. These topics ranged from dealing with depression and anxiety to vaccination schedules for children. I found this to be a good time to talk with the ladies, get to hear their life stories, and answer their health related questions. Some of my other duties at the shelter included clerical work, helping out in the social security office, and volunteering at the Pike Street Homeless Clinic.

My favorite part of my internship was spent working at the homeless health clinic right down the street from the shelter. The clinic staff allowed me to perform patient interviews and physical exams. The physicians at the clinic also allowed me to shadow them while they saw the patients after I had gathered all background information. This clinic was an amazing place to work; every patient went out of their way to state how grateful they were that such a clinic existed and that without it they would have no way of gaining their daily medications or routine health care. It wasn't abnormal to see a patient come in that had been suffering from a foot infection for weeks. The physician usually was able to clean the infected area, provide a simple antibiotic, and some sterile bandages. A week later the patient would come back completely healed and grateful that their foot finally was no longer bothering them. Also since I worked in both the shelter and the homeless clinic their was a great deal of overlap between the clients at both locations. The fact that I worked at the clinic as well as the shelter helped to ease many of the shelter residents' fears of going to see a doctor about their health problems.

My internship at the Welcome House Shelter and the Pike Street Homeless Clinic provided me with an invaluable amount of knowledge and life experience. I learned a great deal about the homeless population in the Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati areas. I learned about the daily problems this population faces and the obstacles they have to conquer in order to get back on their feet and get as they called it, "their old lives back." The clients I interacted with and the homeless resources I learned about this summer will no doubt prove to be priceless knowledge to have regardless of whatever career in medicine I decide to pursue. On the last day of my internship, the staff and residents of the shelter spent a large amount of time thanking me for all the help and advice I had given them throughout my eight weeks there. I then proceeded to thank them for an equal amount of time because I knew that I had been the one that had truly received a gift. I had the pleasure of interacting with an amazing group of staff members, thirty to forty shelter residents who allowed me to hear and then become part of their life stories, and a countless number of clinic patients who again allowed me learn about their life and medical histories.