Anna D'Angela (first year PA student, class of 2020) shares her experience at Shelter Health Network.
What LP did you do? I spent four ½ days with the Shelter Health Network (SHN). SHN is a group of health care and social service providers who provide primary care to people who are homeless/vulnerably housed without a family doctor in the Hamilton community. They have 15 clinics across the city in various shelters, transitional living, community organizations and other locations. They partner with various organizations in the city, including CMHA, YWCA Hamilton and Good Shepherd.Their role is to bring health care directly to people who are facing the greatest barriers to accessing it. For my LP, I was able to go to four clinics in four different locations and follow three different physicians. How did you go about contacting and arranging the LP? The Shelter Health Network has a website (http://shelterhealthnetwork.ca) with an application section that outlines what you can do to go about applying to spend some time with them. Before me, they had never taken on a PA before, so I went through the process of originally contacting the administrator to see if I could apply, and once that was sorted out, I filled out the application and the clinic dates/physician/locations were provided to me. What did you learn from the LP? I got to visit four different clinics on four different days, and with SHN’s focuses on primary care, I saw a wide variety of clinical presentations. Being so early on in my clinical training, it was, at its most basic level, a great opportunity to see medicine in action.I also developed a greater appreciation for the complexities of providing care for people who face or have faced unique barriers to accessing care and other services. Some folks shared their stories of being discriminated against in their efforts to find housing, by other health care institutions, etc. These are all things people bring with them in their interactions with their health care provider and in many cases, can have a direct (or indirect) impact on their health. The physicians I was with had to be able to navigate sometimes very complex, bureaucratic systems to advocate for their patients. As health care providers, it is important to ask questions, be open minded and listen in a non-judgemental way. I really took that sentiment away from this placement. What do you wish you had known beforehand to help in your LP? Just a lot more medicine. Many of the patients that we saw had complex medical and social issues. Given that I did this LP towards the end of MF1, I was still very new in my training so it was a lot of new information. I also wish I had had a better appreciation for addictions medicine. Some of the clients we saw had had substance use disorder/alcohol use disorder, which I had studied many years ago as an undergraduate student from a social sciences perspective. So, my clinical exposure was limited. However, SHN does a great job sending you an information package BEFORE your first session to try to give you key information you should know. I found this really helpful to read. How has this experience help you clinically, in class and/or in career decision-making? We talk alot about the “social” side of medicine in tutorial, ProComp, and other venues; how the social determinants of health interplay with the physical health of patients and families. This LP was really a chance for me to work with folks where this is not an afterthought, but an integral consideration in the care they are providing. This is important, no matter what area of medicine you are in, but in other experiences I had, the focus seemed to be almost exclusively on the “clinical case”. It also solidified for me my interest in potentially working with underserved populations as a PA, and seeing whether there is a role for PAs like this in the future. Comments are closed.
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