Four weeks in review

This past Wednesday was my halfway point of my summer project. Today, I met with Kate, the volunteer coordinator and my supervisor to reflect on what I've done so far and discuss goals for the next few weeks. Basic summary:

What I've done/liked:

- Started the data collection of diabetic patients' progress from January - April and trained two fellow volunteers to work on the project

- Help conduct a neighborhood assessment in the areas that most of our refugees/immigrants live in to determine location for future medical/nutritional outreach programs

- Helped prepare for our weekly refugees, act as a "floater" to help out the phlebotomist, behavioral health counselor, and refugee coordinator every Monday morning

Goals for the next four weeks:

- As of now, our "Patient Hospitality Volunteer" role is essentially becoming obselete. Although it is the most popular role for untrained college volunteers, the role is not necessary and often volunteers feel bored or useless. I would like to help redesign this role so that it becomes an asset to this clinic. One thing I have noticed is that patients tend to spend a fair amount of time waiting alone and bored in their rooms for a doctor/nurse to come in - a perfect opportunity for a volunteer to provide extra educational material to the patient. Since poor diet is one of the main causes of problems we see in the clinic, I'm going to work on re-introducing in-clinic nutrition education as part of a volunteer role. Essentially, volunteers will look for patients waiting for their nurse/physician and offer to provide education on portion control, the food pyramid, healthy eating habits, etc. We purchased a cart today that will become the "nutrition cart" for volunteers to wheel in and out of rooms. Right now, I'm working on finding interpreters to translate the materials into Arabic (since we have the Spanish and English versions already) and updating old material to incorporate the new curriculum that Siloam's year-long volunteer, Bonnie, used for her Clairmont nutrition class. I hope to create an educational binder for volunteers to find information from, a plethora of handouts to use to give to interested patients in multiple languages, and a way for volunteers to positively interact with and help patients in a non-medical way. I also am going to help plan an educational session for hospitality volunteers in the fall so that they can learn the nutrition material and learn about their new role in the clinic. Not only will this provide Siloam with an effective, meaningful way to utilize volunteer capacity, but it will also help address the problems of poor diet, obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes that we see too often in our patient population.

- I also would like to continue to pursue planning nutrition classes in the community for the fall semester. However, there are administrative hurdles that need to be overcome before this can proceed, but I'm hoping that by the end of my summer project, we will have a clear idea of where nutritional outreach is heading in the future. Regardless, by building up and enhancing the in-clinic nutrition education, I will be simultaneously be preparing Arabic versions of our nutritional materials, so hopefully we will get the green light to pursue this outreach further.

- I am also going to continue the Diabetes project, hopefully finishing patient data through June by the end of my summer project. I will continue this in the fall. Working with Dr. Graber has been incredibly rewarding and educational, and I want to continue to build this project up from Siloam's side.

- Last, as a more personal growth endeavor, I am going to start coming to the clinic in the evenings to shadow some of the specialist, volunteer physicians to get a better grasp of patient care in an underserved setting and to try to build relationships with those who volunteer here.