National Health Leadership Consortium

The DOCS National Health Leadership Consortium (NHLC) aims to be a national springboard for discussion and collaboration among medical students seeking to serve their communities, in addition to aiding students in creating and realizing meaningful community health initiatives at their own institutions. The initiative continues to evolve with the goal of involving more students, organizations, and institutions nationally. Our information-sharing model has already had several successes, including:

Florida Clinics Collaborative (FCC): In partnership with the University of Florida, DOCS NHLC formed a Florida Clinics Collaboration that includes medical schools from across Florida. We have assisted other Florida medical schools with a variety of endeavors, including assisting Florida International University medical school in setting up REDCap to use as their electronic medical record system for health-fairs, sharing the details of the UM DOCS upperclassmen clinical elective structure with University of Central Florida, and sharing online training modules and standard operating procedures with all other Florida schools who are looking to implement Intimate Partner Violence training into their free clinics. During the COVID pandemic, we disseminated DOCS protocols with other schools on how we were updating our procedures as well as a protocol for communicating with local health systems.

NHLC is actively advising a group of interested students at the newly founded Nova College of Medicine in how to start a free health fair and clinic in the setting of a new medical school. NHLC aims to help Nova College of Medicine identify a health fair site and scope of services in a way that is sustainable for a newly founded organization and establish their inaugural health fair by Spring 2022.

This year, NHLC is collaborating with the University of Florida to establish Uber Health at our CHS clinic. University of Florida has already implemented Uber Health at their free clinics as a means to improve appointment attendance for patients who lack reliable transportation to and from their appointments, and they are guiding us through the logistical groundwork that was laid to implement this program.

National Clinics Collaborative (NCC): NHLC has begun to expand the Florida Clinics Collaborative Model to other states and regions around the country. NHLC aims to disseminate the DOCS model by creating a “starter-kit” for how to start a clinic and/ or a health fair using the DOCS structure as a guideline. NHLC has partnered with UF to create a survey to assess clinic and health fair demographics that will be disseminated nationally to assess needs for clinic and health fair services. During the COVID pandemic, there were collaboration efforts to translate important COVID health information, gather and provide information on obtaining stimulus checks, and establish EMRs for student-run free clinics.

IDEA Clinic Expansion: After contact established at the annual DOCS Community Health Leadership Conference, medical students at University of Central Florida (UCF), University of Florida (UF), and University of South Florida (USF) all expressed interest in establishing their own needle exchange clinic, modeled after the IDEA Needle Exchange. NHLC facilitated meetings between the UCF and UF student groups and Dr. Hansel Tookes, founder of the Miami IDEA Clinic, to help them navigate the current political landscape and engage key community leaders. NHLC has also connected with students in Texas, California, Arizona, and New York who are interested in collaborating on needle exchange programs.