My First General Body Meeting

Asalamuwalaikum Everyone,

This will be an overview of my first meeting with Bayanihan Clinic. Clinic meetings take place two Mondays a month on campus, usually in Olson Hall. The meeting are all structured in generally the same way. All of the volunteers are required to attend every meeting because important updates are presented regarding the logistics of the clinic.

I was pretty excited attending the first meeting because I was able to fully realize the extent of my involvement in the clinic. Just sitting and listening to the student coordinators go over things as mundane as restocking supplies to things as interesting as patient emergencies really helped me feel as though I was part of something real. It's hard to explain, but in essence I felt alive and motivated; I wanted to jump right in and start participating in anything and everything.

The meeting starts with "Clinical Updates". Fam and Lorigail, our student coordinators, review logistics with the rest of the volunteers. For example, the Aptima tubes for Clamydia and Gonnorehia were switched so the patient had to come back to be retested; thus they had to make sure volunteers took note of this difference for future patients. Or another example, is that they made sure volunteers sent X-rays to the right places (for us its Elk Grove Diagnostics). The student coordinators proceed to ask each volunteer to summarize their interactions and experiences at clinic, which I thought was really awesome because it forces volunteers to reflect on experiences and lessons they learned during on their clinical day.

After the logistics were compeleted, the student coordinators presented upcoming dates for outreach events and fundraisers. Volunteers are expected to take note of these dates so that they can e-mail outreach coordinators in order to sign-up. I was so psyched, that I couldnt help myself from signing up for the first outreach event of the quarter at Tower II(I'll write about that in my next post). I also have to attend a "mock" clinic in which clinical situations are recreated with student coordinators and volunteers acting as patients, while new volunteers would act as intakes. My last training day is a shadowing day in which I follow each of the different clinical positions around as they interact with patients on a real clinical day. Lastly, we talked about the gold tournament fundraiser.

The golf tournament fundraiser is Bayanihan's biggest fundraiser. They hold this event at a country club in Sacramento for community doctors and high class members. The students do performances and interact with doctors, seeking donations for the clinic. This fundraiser is highly successful because every year approximately 20-50,000 dollars are donated. I am really curious to see how this event is organized, and I'm really impressed at how successful it is. The money the clinic makes from this one fundraiser is what helps it run for the rest of the year.

Lastly, a medical student does a power-point presentation on a community-health care issue such as diabetes, obesity, or family planning etc. This week a 3rd year U.C. Davis medical student Marisa Andres presented diabetes. The purpose of these presentations is to educate volunteers in the most common health care issues the clinic must deal with. The presentation was useful for volunteers in that it over-viewed the types of medications diabetic Filipinos should be taking vs. what they're really taking. It also delineated the different tests conducted for diabetes diagnosis such as HbA1c, which reveals the patient's blood blood glucose levels for the last 3 weeks (we want levels to be below 7.0 or 7%), as well as commonly associated complications such as strokes and neuropathy. Lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise are also assessed; it was shown that with proper diet and exercise patients could actually get off of insulin medications. Unfortunately, Filipinos have an unhealthy diet (high in carbs and lipids) and a relatively sedentary lifestyle; thus, the challenge with most patients it trying to convey to them the importance of exercise and dietary modifications.

To summarize, I benefitted a lot from the meeting because it really showed me how involved the volunteers are in the health care delivery process. Clinical updates allow volunteers to understand how an effective health care delivery model should logistically, which is great because as future health care professionals we need every perspective we can get of how a clinic works. The medical student presentation was really meant to educate volunteers on how to assess diabetes from both a clinical and social standpoint so that they can advise patients effectively in clinic. I can already tell that this clinic is amazing training ground for future doctors, and I couldn't ask for a better environment to continue my journey in medicine!