KU med students help homeless tackle ‘barriers to care’

A year ago, Claire Thomas and Christina Bourne helped coordinate health screenings at the United Way of the Plains’ count of Wichita’s homeless population.

The two women, both medical students at the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita, felt good about their contributions that day, but they wanted to do something more to help homeless people receive medical care.

Thomas and Bourne were already active volunteers in the JayDoc Community Clinic, which KU medical students have run for 10 years in Wichita in partnership with the Catholic Diocese’s Guadalupe Clinic. But while the JayDoc Saturday clinic can meet the needs of the working poor, it wasn’t ideally situated to help the more transient homeless population.

The medical students envisioned the JayDoc Outreach Clinic, which a year later has become a reality, serving about eight to 10 patients every Thursday evening. As with other JayDoc programs, the outreach clinic is staffed by medical students under the supervision of a licensed physician.

Bourne and Thomas worked with physician Scott Moser, KU faculty advisor for the JayDoc Community Clinic, to sort out the logistics of the outreach clinic. Initially, they envisioned some sort of mobile clinic. But in talks with David Gear, director of the Guadalupe Clinic, they ended up finding an ideal location: space for a clinic in the Rycon building on North Broadway. The building is next to the Lord’s Diner, which serves a free hot meal every evening to hundreds of people.

“It’s been almost a charmed process,” Thomas said. “Initially, the patient load kind of waxed and waned. Now the patient base knows we’re there every week.”

In addition to providing the facility and supplies, Guadalupe Clinic staffs the outreach clinic with a nurse and an administrator to help with patient flow.

Patients tend to need some acute care, for such things as foot problems, skin rashes and minor infections. Many also need chronic care, for such things as hypertension and diabetes. In those cases, the students and supervising physician work to provide some continuity of care.

Moser says the population the outreach clinic serves is a challenging one. Often patients experience both mental and physical illness.

“They have a lot of barriers to care,” he said. “People don’t experience illness in a vacuum. What’s going on psychologically and what’s going on socially – that has implications in how you care for people.”

Both Thomas and Bourne speak of a strong desire to help the homeless.

“I live downtown, so I’ve always been aware of the need,” Thomas said.

Before entering graduate school and then medical school, Bourne spent a year working with homeless veterans in Arizona.

“I got a pretty bleak picture of health care and how people are treated when they’re underserved,” she said. “You have to be willing to work with them because their lives are very chaotic. You have to go to them.”

Bourne and Thomas are grateful for the sustaining support of the Guadalupe Clinic and the KU medical school and faculty, but their vision isn’t quite complete yet. They hope to involve students from other disciplines, such as social work and physical therapy. This month, their first physical therapy student assisted at the outreach clinic.

“My hat is off to them,” Moser said. “They are busier and doing more than I did in medical school. … It’s a nice combination of medical education and community service.”

This story was originally published March 1, 2015 at 2:31 PM with the headline "KU med students help homeless tackle ‘barriers to care’."