Gaining Experience, Giving Care at the CORE Clinic by Eugene Masters, OMS II
Some of RVU's students have opened a 501(c)(3) non-profit, student-run clinic! The Center for Osteopathic Outreach, Research, & Education (CORE) provides free medical care to our underserved neighbors in the Parker community. If CORE sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because some of our Casual Dress Monday proceeds are donated to CORE each month! Thank you for supporting this awesome initiative! The clinic was originally founded by third-year students Ali Zaidi and Phillip Mann. They had experience working with free clinics before matriculation and they wanted to continue their involvement in such projects throughout their school years. Since RVU was still a relatively new school at the time, a student-run clinic had not yet been formed. SDs Zaidi and Mann embraced RVU’s value of service, choosing to expand their own service to the community by forming the CORE Clinic. Their vision was to form a student-run clinic, providing an opportunity to learn the administrative aspects of running a clinic, a consistent location for first- and second-year students to apply their classroom and clinical knowledge skills on real patients, a platform for future research projects, interaction with local members of the healthcare community, and free health services to the local medically underserved families and individuals. They spent their first two years forming the foundation for the clinic by researching legal statutes, reaching out to lawyers for support with legal documentation, researching other free clinics in the area, and obtaining official 501(c)(3) status. In February of 2016, with boards and rotations looming in their near futures, SDs Zaidi and Mann reached out to the Class of 2019, asking for new leaders who could continue the project. Hayley Hellstern, OMS II, Taylor Reiser, OMS II, and I applied, committing ourselves to further develop the clinic. Over the last year and a half, we worked together to find a physical location for the clinic, to gain donations and financial support from local charities and businesses, to reach out to local physicians for their support and oversight, to gather medical equipment and supplies, and, finally, to open the clinic’s doors to its first patients.
S SDs Hellstern, Zaidi, Master, and Reiser
This year, CORE Clinic partnered with the Sky Ridge Medical Center's Family Medicine Residency Program. Thanks to the enormous commitment by Dr. Stephanie Chiu, Program Director, the clinic hosted its first open night on February 7th. The Church at Parker has graciously allowed us to use its space on Tuesdays from 5-9pm. As of this writing, CORE Clinic has been open for 6 nights, has seen 15 patients, and has had 2 physicians, 3 residents, and 34 RVU students volunteer!
Medical students can volunteer to see patients and gain clinical experience. The patient workflow was designed to partially resemble third-year rotations, allowing students to practice for the future. The clinic is overseen each night by an attending physician or resident. First- and second-year students work in teams to gather a patient’s medical history, perform physical and osteopathic exams, present their findings to a resident or attending, and type a real SOAP note into the electronic health record system. This also provides students with an exceptional opportunity to begin networking with health care professionals in the area. Currently, patients can be seen for acute sick visits, general wellness checkups, sports physicals, and nurse visits (such as checking blood pressures and blood sugar levels). CORE Clinic’s aim for the future is to expand its hours, locations, and types of offered medical services. We are also seeking to partner with other training programs and specialties in order to strengthen team-based services and cooperation and to expand learning opportunities. With boards and rotations now looming for the Class of 2019, new members from the Class of 2020 have been selected to continue these efforts: Tanner Bond, Charles Curtis, Jennifer Irvine, Jillianne Nanadiego, and Amelia Sneve. If you are interested in volunteering as a student or attending physician, please go to www.CoreClinic.org and click “Volunteer” to sign up!
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