Name: Lyon

Year: Junior

Major/Minor(s): Biology/Global Health, Classics

CFS Concentration: Field Studies in Public Health

This quarter I am interning with Health Leads, a program that connects patients to basic, non-medical resources in the South Side community. My office is located in the Chicago Family Health Center. The CFHC provides medical care while Health Leads operates from the belief that patients need to satisfy their basic needs such as food, housing, and transportation before they have the time and energy to worry about their health conditions. For example, an unemployed homeless man is much less likely to worry about his diabetes condition than a middle-class man with a stable home and income. Thus Health Leads fills a crucial gap in the current health care system, which offers basic care to everyone but does not always provide the tools for patients to make the most of it.

I work on Tuesdays and Fridays from 9-5pm at my office in the Chicago Family Health Center. The commute to work can be rough. It often takes about an hour and a half driving to get to the South Side and back. The drive is a bit dull, but once I arrive at the office, things get busy right away. I spend about a third of my time seeing patients in the exam rooms. Once the doctor has finished with them, I walk in to explain what Health Leads does and ask whether they would like to fill out a survey describing the resources they need help with. If the patient agrees to fill out the survey, I enter their information into our database and enroll them as a new client. The rest of my day involves calling my clients to follow up on their resource needs. It can be difficult to reach some clients – I often have to leave a voicemail or send a text requesting call-back, and it usually takes several weeks to resolve an issue. This aspect of my job strongly resembles social work. The cool part about it is that I work alongside fellow college students, most of them premeds from the University of Chicago. In this regard, working at Health Leads does not feel intimidating or burdensome as another internship might.

The work I do at Health Leads is very fulfilling, especially as a premed student. I feel that I am getting a good understanding of the barriers faced by low income communities. Doctors are often too busy to address these issues, and as a result they may misunderstand their patients. For example, a doctor may think, “Why isn’t this patient coming in for his periodic check-ups? His blood pressure is going to be out of control if he doesn’t get it checked out.” As a Health Leads Advocate, I speak to the patient and find out the other side of his story. Maybe he doesn’t have transportation readily available or a family emergency prevents him from attending his appointments. Whatever the case may be, Health Leads helps the client arrange transportation and equips him with the resources to meet basic needs in the future.

When I tell my friends about my internship, they often say, “That’s so cool!” or “That’s so interesting! I’ve never heard of something like this before.” That should not be the case. The work that Health Leads does should become a model, a standard for all community health centers that work with underserved communities. With these services, we provide holistic care that addresses patients’ basic needs as well as their medical needs. I hope this model will become more widespread in the near future.