Community Health

This week was my first week as a CPGC intern at Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center in North Brooklyn.

I was expecting to dive right in but, I got a good understanding of the day-to-day bureaucracy within the public hospital system. I arrived on Monday and was sent straight to Employee Health Services to receive medical clearance in order to obtain a permanent hospital employee ID card. I was also directed to Human Resources where I filled out several forms regarding my work in the hospital.

While all of these things seemed painful and tedious at the time, as I was itching to get started, they are really important and directly affect the services patients receive from their providers.

Afterwards, I met with my supervisor in the Asthma Care program at the hospital. She and I went over my role in the program and handed me a large packet of information to begin studying in order to be able to educate patients next week. I’ve got a lot of memorizing to do.

Next week, I will begin working with the Chronic Illness Demonstration Project program. I will be attending a meeting in the city with New York City Hospital workers. I am looking forward to learning more about that program. I have read a lot of material on it but, I can’t wait to hear about it from people who are working to make it a reality.

On Wednesday of this week, I was working in the Asthma program office and we were asked by visitors from Project Sunshine ( a non-profit that brings celebrities to visit children in hospitals) to bring children from our specialty clinic to meet and hang out with 20 members of the New York Giants. The children were so excited and it was great to see how it brigthened their day.

On Friday, I had a meeting with my supervisor in Asthma care and we spoke in Spanish about the questions I had regarding the material for patient education and my duties that I would start preforming next week.

My other supervisor, also handed me a side project to begin working on. The Mayor’s Office of Adult Education and CUNY  have developed lifestyle educational videos for Spanish speakers who are in the early stages of learning English. They are like “telenovelas” or Spanish soap operas and they have themes such as “Stay in School” and “Asthma: the Soap Opera.” I am looking forward to viewing the movies this weekend and then surveying patients on their opinions of the videos next week.

I received medical clearance and I can now interact one-on-one with patients and I will begin doing that on Monday!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 11:01 am by Ariel Herm '10 and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.