Here I am, sitting in a room with some really amazing people. They are all very different from each other. To my left is a man in his sixties with a distinct San Francisco accent, who is asking a whole lot of questions. Every time he does so, he clips his glasses over his nose, only to unclip them after he has listened to his answer. On stage two women are talking. The young one is passionately talking about her experience as a mental health practitioner in Mississippi, tackling the infinite need of an adolescent population with little access to quality care in such crucial years of their lives. The other one is older, a doctor from West Virginia. She has just finished recounting how gaining the trust of the community she lives and works with has taken a long time and much patience, but has yielded invaluable results for the patients of the mobile clinics she works in. In the audience I can hear a baby cry. A family from southern Arizona is here. The mother and father left their hometowns and moved all the way to the Mexican border to offer healthcare to the many underserved families that live in the area of Agua Prieta. Who are all these people and where am I?
Every year the Children’s Health Fund, the placement organization I work for, holds a conference where the leaders of their projects across the United States are invited to come together and share experiences and best practices. From southern Louisiana to rural Idaho, these incredibly committed community health practitioners spend four days sharing advice on extreme situations such as how to keep staff security safe in the event of a shooting in Los Angeles, or to how to improve internet connectivity in order to provide telemedicine to patients who would otherwise not be able to access high quality care because the nearest hospital is hundreds of miles away.
What am I doing here? What is my role contributing to the amazing work of these people? I live in a comfortable house in New York City and with easy access to all the facilities I need. How do I serve in this context? For the last three months I have been working in CHF’s medical affairs department, collecting and analyzing data collected by all the different projects that I saw represented in this room. I analyze data on patient referrals to secondary care and how to improve them, data on how healthcare problems can impact the learning of school children, on how homeless youth’s medical needs differ from those of the regular population, and how they can best be addressed. The results of these monitoring, evaluation, and research activities are presented as feedback to the outstanding people I am surrounded by. Together, we build new solutions in access to healthcare, foster discussion and exchange in order to create newer standards of quality care for community health, and access funding for these projects so that universal healthcare becomes a reality.