Week Four (6/27-7/1)

 

  • At the beginning of the fourth week, I felt nearly completely established at Covenant House. I have been working on tasks that has allowed me to be the primary case manager for a few clients in both the homeless prevention housing and health equity divisions of Covenant House. I’ve been given more and more autonomy to contact clients, keep their case files at my desk, sit in on intakes with clients, and provide transportation for certain clients. I still help Jodie manage the food pantry by helping families through the pantry to pick their food items, assist the volunteers, help receive food orders, and organizing the storage room. Although, if Cassie or Renee need me to address certain clients- Jodie usually allows me to be their extra pillar of support. That has happened a few times this week- especially with two clients (Case Study #2 and Case Study #3). Both were unique in their own ways, empowering, and a great wealth of building my knowledge and capacity for empathy. One of the clients was a result of depleted funding for some of our projects. Despite the fact that Covenant House receives ample funds to address community concerns of poverty and homelessness- sometimes it isn’t enough. Therefore, for a certain client, Renee and Cassie needed to collaborate to provide a client support for housing. I was extremely humbled and moved by this client because they had been deaf for a good number of years. Since I know sign language, I was able to interpret conversations with them. It was extremely gratifying and grounding to have provided something as simple a reliable means of conversation. Not only does it impart to me the necessity of being able to communicate with deaf communities, but to provide to recognize that a unique lived experience of deaf and hard of hearing communities that they are made a little less autonomous in a world that demands to be heard- but not exactly seen. Another client that I had encountered was through Cassie- they were one of the first individuals that I had encountered in a mental health episode that bordered between extreme mania and psychosis. I was one of the individuals that was tasked with assisting and monitoring this specific client, attempting to keep tabs on them in our building throughout the day. I also was required to assist another social service agency with this client which resulted in my need to transport her across the city. I felt that this experience not only invigorated my interest in psychology in its relation to trauma foundations, but really began my growth of how to handle people who are in extremely fragile mental states. The fourth week, I felt, grew my knowledge/empathy capacity for not only the organization, the people of Charleston, the people of the entire state of West Virginia, and the kind of life that I want to lead as a doctor.


  • Another aspect to the program that I’m participating in, SHECP, requires that their students participate in certain zoom presentations. While I am in the education and youth outreach cohort and am required to attend zoom meetings related to such, my true passion is medicine with my intention to apply to medical school May of 2023. So, I intend to attend the zoom meetings for both my cohort and the health and wellness cohort. I have been very lucky at my current placement to collaborate with our health equity office to view medical public health intervention from a social work perspective. From my experiences working in our health equity office at Covenant House combined with a presentation by Dr. Jarrell on Social Emergency Medicine, it not only invigorated me to envision exactly my position as a doctor in 15 years, but also the role of emergency medicine in the scheme of medical public health. For quite some time, I was always told by doctors and medical school students that my desire to tackle healthcare inequities like poverty, systemic racism, discrimination against the queer community, and religious discrimination would be near impossible to address in emergency medicine. Although, Dr. Jarrell informed me of how exactly emergency medicine functions as the pulse and lifeblood of medical public health. It was almost like taking a great sigh of relief in being able to combine my two passions of emergency medicine and being able to address medical public health concerns. Emergency medicine is able to determine some of the most pressing issues within a community because it is where the most utterly vulnerable populations will seek help when they hit rock bottom. Emergency medicine is able to determine immense, deeply concerning problems within communities and are integral to a group of public health administrators to guide their resources, dedication, and understanding of community climate. There are still downsides this kind of public health practice, though, that Dr. Jarrell did not mention: ER doctors must work from a tertiary perspective to address public health problems. They have to take the worst possible scenarios and help public health administrators not only agree that there is a problem, but contribute to the change of their healthcare system and public health system to address a problem that has already reached its worst caliber. It is not prevention work and it is not harm reduction which are statistically the better avenues to addressing public health. Instead, emergency medicine is given an immense problem to begin with and will need to reconcile on how to address it. Therefore, I recognize the unwavering need of people to be trained in an environment where they not only address dire physiological disease/illness states, but the horrific social problem that is afflicting a certain community. It makes sense, even though it is uncommon, to combine medical emergences with social emergencies. Individuals trained to function in dire circumstances, you would think, have the capacity to respond to emergencies in any setting. Thank you for letting me express my thoughts and reflect! I know this was much longer than necessary, but this fellowship clicked for me. I think this is what I want to do with my career and passion for emergency medicine as a practicing EMT. It was an extremely humbling experience. Thank you for the opportunity to introduce me to something of such great passion and opportunity.

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