Community Action and Care for the Medically Uninsured
Amherst Survival Center Free Medical Clinic $15,000 – to hire a part-time Clinic Manager to oversee the transition to a higher-capacity operation of this newly expanded, entirely volunteer medical personnel, Free Medical Clinic serving more than 500 individuals in the Hampshire and Franklin counties.
CHANGE $10,000 – to support the expansion of the tuberculosis screening and educational program; conducted by volunteer physicians, medical students, nursing and pharmacy students, and other healthcare workers, to shelters in Central Mass. in an effort to identify and treat additional latent tuberculosis patients.
Greater Westfield Free Health Services $5,000 – to support this physician led volunteer medical team which provides free health services to meet the needs of Westfield residents and its surrounding Western MA communities who are uninsured and under insured.
MetroWest Free Medical Program $10,000 – to engage existing and new physician, other health care and lay person volunteers to expand regular services beyond the clinic sessions offered on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights in Framingham and Sudbury, to include health screening, education, and patient referrals through three food pantries.
The Family Van $10,000 – to support the organization’s Youth Initiative, which targets high-risk youth, ages 12 to 24, in Boston’s most underserved neighborhoods, and provides mobile health care screenings and education.
The Sharewood Project $5,000 – to support this entirely student-operated medical clinic which relies exclusively on volunteers to provide free health services to Greater Boston’s most vulnerable residents.
Heywood Hospital $20,000 – to support a part-time pharmacist who will provide bedside counseling on medication use, in-home consultation and monitoring to include medication reconciliation to identify any drug-related problems, and would serve as a liaison with patient’s primary care physicians, caregivers, and pharmacies.
Community Health Programs $35,000 – to outfit the medical van with equipment for a mobile ophthalmic office to provide all ages with comprehensive screening, diagnosis, and treatment for eye disease. The mobile clinic will travel to outlying rural areas, senior centers, food pantries, and Head Start programs providing care to populations that are at a severe economic, mobility, and health disadvantage.
Girls Inc. of Worcester $10,000 to support Promoting Healthy Lifestyles for At-Risk Girls and its program components Fit Girls and Friendly PEERsuasian, which goals are to improve the health of vulnerable low-income girls in Worcester and address unhealthy behaviors including tobacco/substance use, poor nutrition, and lack of exercise.
Restoring Sight International $15,000 – to support the program Vision Screenings for At-Risk Seniors, which provides free vision screenings to seniors in their local communities, on-location at seniors’ daily meal sites.
UMASS Memorial Medical Center $15,000 – to support a home-based asthma reduction program with children with asthma and their families living in Worcester’s low-income Bell Hill neighborhood. Children who have multiple asthma-related urgent/emergency visits or admissions; are not taking, filling or refilling prescriptions or are overusing rescue medicines; miss school days; or have functional limitations will be targeted for this pilot.
Upham’s Corner Health Center $10,000 – to support a multilingual patient navigator for the Comprehensive Colonoscopy Engagement project. The primary objectives of the intervention are to decrease missed or cancelled appointments and to promote early detection.
International Health Studies
Kristin Dwyer, MD, an Emergency Medicine Resident at Boston Medical Center who will travel to the Hue Central Hospital and Hue University of Medicine in Vietnam to provide patient care and provider education. Her responsibility includes 20 clinical shifts, 10 case discussion lectures, and 5-10 formal curriculum lectures for the students, residents and providers in the Emergency Department. In addition, she will teach an ultrasound curriculum during her time in Hue which will include lectures and hands on training.
Abhijeet Patil, MD, a fellow in the UMASS Medical School Fellowship Program, who will travel to the Government Hospital in Beed, India. Dr. Patil will conduct a cross sectional community based needs assessment on elderly men and women of age 60 years and above, who will be drawn from field practice area of Government Hospital in Beed, India. The outcome goal of this project is to use the data to establish a community level geriatric care program that will effectively provide high quality health care for elderly, who are economically poor, lacking access to medical care, and are lacking health care resources in Beed.
Raj Vyas, MD, a Resident in the Harvard Combined Plastic Surgery Residency Program who will travel to Hospitalier et Universitaire de Treichville in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Africa. Dr. Vyas, working with the Global Smile Foundation, will directly serve Abijanians by repairing cleft lips and palates in an underserved region without any regional alternative physicians. In addition, in partnership with local providers, he will establish comprehensive cleft centers and provide intra-operative teaching alongside formal didactics.
Kelli Jarrett, a medical student at Boston University School of Medicine who will travel to Shirati, Tanzania. Ms. Jarrett, under the supervision of a family medicine physician trained in the US, will be providing full-spectrum family medicine to an underserved population in rural Tanzania. This will include diagnosis and treatment of most health care problems for both children and adults, including maternity care. Many of the visits to the clinic are for treatment of infectious diseases, including HIV, schistosomiasis and other parasitic infections, and malaria. In addition, she will be helping with public health intervention through the clinic, including visiting schools to administer anti-parasitic medications to school children and providing vaccination in the clinic.
Michael Matergia, a medical student at Harvard Medical School who will travel to Darjeeling, West Bengal, India. Mr. Matergia, under the direct supervision of a physician, will conduct initial evaluations, present patients, develop management plans, communicate, and coordinate care at both Planter’s Hospital and the outpatient clinic at the Darjeeling District Hospital. He will participate in daily rounds and outpatient clinic sessions. Additionally, he will participate in clinical outreach programs such as rural health camps. Through his community development project, he will strive to improve the activities of the Comprehensive Health and Hygiene Improvement Program, serving impoverished and disadvantaged families from rural communities surrounding Darjeeling. These families are either laborers on tea plantations or subsistence farmers. During his time in Darjeeling, he will directly oversee the initial implementation of an innovative model for child mental health.
