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Glasses for the Homelessby April Sutton 
BCM Instructor Loretta King watches as a grateful patient tries on new glasses. Some aspiring physicians have vision. Others, like Eric Hyun, provide it. Hyun, a fifth-year M.D./Ph.D. student at BCM is helping to provide basic vision care through Houston Outreach Medicine, Educational and Social Services (HOMES), where he has been a volunteer for the past five years. "Our patients often requested dental and vision care, but we were unable to help them," Hyun said. "We had a significant amount of training in ophthalmology, so I felt like we could provide them with basic vision care. The Student Leadership in Community Service (S.L.i.C.S.) grant was an excellent opportunity for me to provide our patients with something that they really needed." The S.L.i.C.S. Program is a new, innovative grant program designed to encourage medical student involvement in community service. Joslyn Fisher, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine at BCM, created the grant program from her experiences in working with first-year medical students in an advocacy elective course, Physician as Advocate: Beyond the Exam Room. "A majority of the medical students had done an extensive amount of community service before coming to Baylor," she said. "For those who do maintain their interest and involvement in community activities there are very few rewards, minimal funding and a lack of recognition." S.L.i.C.S. was kicked off in the Spring of 2005. The Baylor Academy of Distinguished Educators provided the pilot funding for S.L.i.C.S., which enabled the S.L.i.C.S. committee to fund three of the medical student community service grant proposals and to give a community service award to a graduating fourth-year medical student. The program is designed to foster students' community spirit, support their advocacy efforts and enhance their natural leadership skills Fisher says. Kendall Moseley, M.D., who is currently completing her internal medicine residency at John Hopkins University, was actively involved in community service while at BCM. Moseley was selected to receive the S.L.i.C.S Award for her help in developing an after-school health education program for underserved high school students and a number of other projects that she helped foster. In February of 2005 students began the process of creating a proposal and filling out applications. Each grant proposal was reviewed by a faculty committee and ranked based on the applicant's background, rationale for the project, merit/impact of the project, budget, and their plan for evaluation and sustainability. "We were looking for projects that would have the greatest impact on the local community and medical students," Fisher said. "In our pilot year we were only able to fund three projects, but our ultimate goal is to be able to fund them all." Geoffrey Preidis, Valory Wangler and Hyun each received funding to implement their community service project proposals. Second-year M.D./Ph.D. student Preidis' project, "Raising HIV/AIDS Awareness Among Teens in a High-Risk Area," allowed him to travel to Haiti and work with a local youth group to create and promote an educational play directed towards preventing the spread of HIV. Wangler, a fourth-year student, through her "Needs Assessment and Immigrant Center" project, developed a program to provide critical health information to newly arrived immigrants in the Houston area. When Hyun created "New Vision for HOMES" he says he knew very little about ophthalmology, but since the program's beginning he's learned a lot in order to provide his patients with the best vision care. Being homeless means living a life of hard knocks, but not being able to see clearly makes everything significantly harder. Many of Houston's homeless don't seek immediate medical attention for their medical conditions because they are not seen as a priority, says Hyun, they are more worried about where they will get their next meal or where they are going to lay their head at night. "There are a lot of health problems that, if detected early, can be treated before the patient requires more extensive treatment, and that's what this program is designed to do," Hyun said. "We're hoping to catch glaucoma and other vision problems early on before they get worse." Hyun has partnered with Peter Chang, M.D., an assistant professor of ophthalmology at BCM, to get the necessary equipment to perform glaucoma and vision screenings of the HOMES patients. HOMES is a multi-institutional student-run free clinic that serves Houston's homeless and is a partnership with Healthcare for the Homeless-Houston. Hyun says the biggest hurdle is finding enough glasses for everyone that needs them. "We want to give the homeless of Houston their vision back and help them find their way off the streets," Hyun said. "This serves as a good reminder of why I went into medicine." The application process for S.L.i.C.S. grants and nominations for the graduating student community service award for this year began in January. "Right now we only have two years of start-up funds available, but our goal is to get an endowment so that we can make this an on-going program to support every meritorious community service project proposed by the medical students," Fisher said. |
Patient CareA New Medical School for Botswana ResearchStars and Workhorses: A Varied Future for Stem Cells Unfolding the Tiniest Problems EducationCommunity ServiceAlumni & DevelopmentThe Story Behind the Jewish Building From a One-Room School to Medical Research College News
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Volume 2, Issue 1, Spring 2006 |
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