Community Health Clinic
Community Health Clinic Offers Opportunity to Serve Diverse Communities
By Greg Burrell and Drew Landsdown, MS 2 Clinic Coordinators
Greg Burrell, MS 2
Since 2003, physicians and students from the University of Chicago have been volunteering at Community Health Clinic (CHC), a free medical clinic for adults without health insurance. On Monday nights, Pritzker students make the trek to CHC, located just west of downtown Chicago, to help serve patients in what is always an exciting evening. With a patient mix that is ethnically and racially much different from that of the University of Chicago Medical Center—about one-third of the patients at CHC are Spanish-speaking and roughly another quarter of the patients are Polish-speaking—working at CHC is a broadening experience.
Drew Landsdown, MS 2
On a typical evening at clinic, medical student volunteers triage the first patients to arrive. They check blood pressure and vitals, take a blood glucose reading, and get a brief description of why the patient has come in to clinic. Once the patient is taken to a room, medical students are involved with the entire examination process. First and second-year medical student volunteers typically speak with the patient to find the chief complaint, gather the history of the patient’s present illness, and find other relevant information like a family, social, psychiatric, and surgical history. Medical students conduct any physical exams they are comfortable performing and present this information to a resident or attending physician. After the student presents, the student and physicians return to the patient’s room to conduct further exams and explain to the patient the next steps. Typically, the medical students summarize this information and write it in the charts as well.
Elizabeth Marlow, MD and Roya Fathi, MS 2
One of the best things about Community Health Clinic is the impressive ability of the clinic to stand on its own despite being entirely free to patients. CHC has a very large in-house pharmacy with an extensive stock selection of common drugs for ailments like diabetes, hypertension, and depression. The clinic also receives frequent donations of patented drugs that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to patients. CHC has an in-house lab that can conduct several tests almost immediately, and if not, the labs can be sent to be read within a day or two. All of these various branches of Community Health Clinic are beneficial because a patient can often get an answer about the best course of action for an ailment that very night. Diagnosing a patient with hypertension is worth nothing if the patient will not be able to afford the antihypertensive medications, and it is really amazing that people can start improving their health situation immediately after their visit to the clinic.
There is no such things as the “same old patient at Community Health Clinic; CHC sees a variety of patients. On our visits to clinic, we have seen individuals come to clinic for management of diabetes and hypertension, and we have seen patients with Huntington’s disease and untreated syphilis. Patients have presented with sexually transmitted infections, psychiatric ailments like depression, and high cholesterol.
First and second-year medical students typically volunteer at CHC, as it’s a wonderful learning experience and a great way to practice for third year and the wards. We also have help from fourth-year students; all years are welcome to join! For more information about Pritzker’s involvement with Community Health Clinic, email Greg Burrell at gburrell@uchicago.edu or Drew Lansdown at lansdown@uchicago.edu.
