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Chapter 25 HealthSTAT: A Student Approach to Building Skills Needed to Serve Poor Communities Carmen Patrick Mohan Arun Mohan Agrowing number of health professionals argue that community service, advocacy , and leadership constitute core professional responsibilities with important implications for responsibly serving poor communities.– Yet, few schools’ curricula address the skills required to fulfill those responsibilities. Such skills include community partnership, public speaking, fundraising, consensus building , organizational management, community organizing, team building, and interprofessional collaboration.– When courses are offered that address these skills, they are often didactic and, in our experience as medical students, marginalized in the curriculum and by our classmates. Throughout the last five decades, students who felt unprepared to serve poor communities by their formal education searched for alternative ways to gain the requisite skills, work across professional lines, and initiate change.– With the notable exception of student-run health clinics (such as those described in this book), student-initiated efforts are only rarely documented in the literature, and little is known about how these programs originate, how they are sustained, and what schools can do to facilitate this kind of leadership and creativity.,,, Here, we address these questions by describing one extracurricular organization through which students in Georgia have taught each other the skills needed to work on behalf of underserved communities: Health Students Taking Action Together (HealthSTAT). We also discuss challenges intrinsic to this learning modality, including limited time and rapid leadership turnover. About HealthSTAT HealthSTAT is a student-led, Georgia-focused, nonprofit organization that emphasizes peer-to-peer learning in medically underserved communities. Students from each of the state’s four medical schools volunteer, along with students from Carmen Patrick Mohan, MD, is an instructor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia. Arun Mohan, MD, MBA, is a practicing hospitalist at Emory University Hospital and an associate vice chair for information technology (IT) in the Emory Department of Medicine. 258 Mohan and Mohan several nursing, public health, and undergraduate institutions. Although medical students represent the largest proportion of volunteers, HealthSTAT is represented at various Georgia professional schools: Emory University schools of medicine, nursing, public health, law, and business; Georgia State University Department of Nutrition; Medical College of Georgia schools of medicine and nursing; Mercer University schools of medicine and nursing; and Morehouse schools of medicine and public health. A minority of our volunteers are undergraduates attending the University of Georgia, Emory University, or Morehouse College. History HealthSTAT began at an informal meeting of five students from Emory and Morehouse schools of medicine who were concerned about the uninsured, a topic they felt was not sufficiently addressed in their classrooms. They convened monthly to teach each other about the issue. Through their conversations, these students came to recognize that just as health students learn clinical skills in real clinical settings, learning community health requires action on real issues. They used e-mail to place an online call for students interested in organizing a candlelight vigil for uninsured Georgians. Nine students from a variety of health professional schools responded. Featured on local television, the event became the 2002 Candlelight Vigil for Uninsured Georgians, was supported by three community partners, and attended by nearly 150 students from 4 of the state’s health professional schools. The vigil is now in its fourth year. Figure 25.1 shows a poster used to advertise the 2005 vigil. Buoyed by this enthusiastic response, these students opted to incorporate HealthSTAT in July 2002 as a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Since then, HealthSTAT has expanded its issue-based agenda to include (1) reducing Georgia’s uninsured , (2) preventing childhood overweight, and (3) preventing HIV/AIDS. As students’ collective interests and community needs change, HealthSTAT’s agenda changes. For example, the board recently adopted increasing access to care as an issue area that includes reducing the number of uninsured and improving access to care for the state’s immigrant community. Program initiation and management As HealthSTAT’s organizational history suggests, passionate student leaders were involved at all stages of its development. The role of passionate leaders continues today. Here, we have attempted to categorize pivotal events and roles captured within the HealthSTAT model. The cornerstone of the model is interprofessional and interinstitutional teambased leadership. Responsibilities are distributed in three ways: programmatically, organizationally, and administratively. Student volunteers hold all positions, unless otherwise noted. Programmatic When HealthSTAT launches an issue area, it provides students with a framework structured around the school calendar to study the issue, work with com- [3.144.233.150] Project...

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