Health Care on the Go
Students volunteer at mobile health care fairs this summer. It’s a lesson in what it’s like to be uninsured.
By John Chen
September 28, 2009
Author John Chen (far left) traveled with the Mobile Health Fair team on his summer break from Vanderbilt (Orbis)
I’ve slept in some interesting places. I’ve also spent entire days in a van and depleted countless boxes of latex gloves. But it’s not as sketchy as it sounds—for ten weeks this summer I joined five other members of the Mobile Health Fair team and traveled around Ohio and Michigan offering free health services to the uninsured and underprivileged.
The Mobile Health Fair (MHF) project is based in Maumee, Ohio. It has a budget of $50,000 and is funded by the Synod of the Covenant, an assembly of 811 Presbyterian churches in Michigan and Ohio. When the program started in the 1960s, it involved a small group of medical professionals working out of a station wagon. Eventually, the majority of Synod offices in the United States had a traveling clinic of some sort. Each year, MHF’s project coordinator Tammy Scheuermann hires six college students to form the team of volunteers. For me and most of the other students, Mobile Health Fair served as way to get a first taste of pursuing prospective careers in nursing or medicine.
At the beginning of the summer, the team underwent a week of training put together by local health organizations like the Central Ohio Diabetes Association, the Ohio Department of Health, Prevent Blindness Ohio, and others. Like the other team members, I became certified to perform a set of standard health screenings to examine blood pressure, pulmonary function, vision, dental, hearing, and blood sugar levels.
In the nine weeks that followed, with the help of 558 other volunteers, our MHF team set up 52 health fairs and served 2,249 people. At each of these health fairs, we recorded test results for evaluation by a physician at the end of all the screening stations. The screenings were not diagnoses, and our team was not qualified to prescribe medication. Instead, a large component of the health fairs was to educate the public and promote awareness about their health.
As we traveled across states we slept in hotels, the homes of volunteers, and even sleeping bags on church floors. The team usually worked five days a week, conducting one or two health fairs per day. We targeted poor inner city neighborhoods, rural agricultural communities, and community centers as far north as Saginaw, Mich. and as far south as Cincinnati, Ohio.
Patients included elderly residents of nursing homes, the homeless in downtown Detroit, Hispanic migrant workers in the fields, and immigrant children in summer schools. Many of the health fair attendees were among the 46 million uninsured Americans and did not have access to any other form of health care. Of those screened, 504 received medical referrals and 54 received dental referrals to local clinics and agencies. Of the 898 diabetes screenings performed, 124 screenings found elevated glucose levels in patients who previously had no diagnosis of diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is especially dangerous; rates are rising among Americans, and the uninsured are often unaware they even have it.
MHF provides a vital service to so many communities, but its future is precarious. The cost of running MHF covers liability insurance, travel expenses, team member salaries, equipment, and supplies. Giving from Presbyterian churches has decreased during the economic recession. Such budget cuts, Scheuermann said, means MHF "was usually the first to be cut." Simultaneously, the cost to run MHF is increasing due to rising fuel prices, and most synods began to eliminate the program. The Synod of the Covenant is the only synod left that has been able to maintain its MHF program for over 40 years.
I count myself among the lucky to have had this experience. Mobile Health Fair had introduced me to a sobering reality of the uninsured that I hadn’t encountered before. It can be one thing to hear about underprivileged citizens and healthcare woes on the news, but it’s entirely different to encounter these people on a daily basis for two and a half months.
John Chen is a sophomore at Vanderbilt University. An earlier version of this article originally appeared in the Orbis, part of the Campus Publications Network.
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