Saturday, 1/12: The Institute for Family Health's Phillip and Sidney Hillman Family Practice

The 2^nd year scholars visited the Phillip and Sidney Hillman Family Practice, a primary care branch of the Institute for Family Health, and a site that we were fortunate to have visited on last year’s trip. We first met with Cristina McGeough, the site's diabetes coordinator, who gave us information on the Institute’s various health care centers, patient populations, and model of care. She was also gracious enough to prepare a brief info session on the nutritional management of at-risk patients from different cultural backgrounds suffering from diabetes. She emphasized the need for providing culturally specific and sensitive dietary recommendations to our patients as a way of potentially increasing patient compliance. We had a chance to role-play specific scenarios where such counseling tools were required, utilizing some of the highly practical educational resources in use at the clinic. She also discussed the "centering" model of group health care in the management of chronic conditions such as diabetes as an effective way of educating and supporting patients with these life-long diseases. One of our Urban Scholar journal discussions at Geisel actually focused on this model of care, so it was very exciting to see it being practiced at this health care institution.

Following Ms. McGeough’s session, we proceeded to the clinic floor, which on Saturdays happens to be the site of the NYC Free Clinic, a collaboration of NYU Langone Medical Center and the Institute for Family Health. At this Free Clinic, run mainly by NYU medical students (in a similar fashion to the Mascoma Clinic locally in New Hampshire), patients from diverse backgrounds receive basic primary care services irrespective of socioeconomic, health, or legal status. There we met with the 4^th year clinical coordinators who are the administrative backbone of the clinic, and the visiting attending physicians who- after giving us a quick overview of the clinic itself- placed us on clinical teams to observe patient visits with the various NYU medical students who were volunteering that day. It was a great experience as it allowed us to observe the outpatient management of conditions which are common to underserved urban populations including Asthma, HIV, etc.