A Typical Day at the Clinic

The Saturday morning begins at 7am when I wake up to prepare for clinic. After the usual morning preparations, I drive over to the Medical School parking lot at 7:30 to meet with other Willow Clinic members. No matter the time of year, 7:30am is always chilly, but quickly begins to warm up. Once everyone has arrived, we split up and carpool over to the Salvation Army in Sacramento. The medical students arrive around 9am and clinic begins. Undergraduates are split up into two groups, one for reception and one for intake.



:: Reception ::
The members in reception are in charge of recruiting homeless patients from the surrounding area and then helping them to fill out a form with questions about their medical history. After the form is completed, each patient is assigned a number; this designates their place in line to be called. Waiting patients will congregate in the reception area or go about on their daily activity such as chatting with friends out in the “yard” or attending morning meetings in the cafeteria. So that people in intake can find the patient later on, people in reception write down a brief physical description of the patient and where he or she is located.



:: Intake ::

    Undergraduates working in intake are responsible for taking down the vital signs and iimmunization history of each patient. Once called from his or her respective location, patients are taken to our intake room where their blood pressure, temperature, pulse, and respiration are measured. During this time, many undergraduates also take the opportunity to chat with each patient to help them relax. Some homeless individuals are quite talkative and will tell you everything about their lives! After vitals are logged, the patients are sent to the screening area to be seen by a medical student.



:: Screening ::

In the screening rooms, medical students will do several tests such as blood sugar and respiratory capacity, as part of a basic physical for each patient. Medical students will also address any concerns about their health which each patient may have. Although undergraduates do not normally play a role in this aspect of clinic, many have the opportunity to shadow the medical students in the screening rooms.



When all the patients have been seen, sometimes the medical students will talk about some of the more interesting cases with everyone else. Or we will listen to a mini lecture from one of the medical students to learn a little more about one aspect of health care such as psychiatric illness or diabetes. After this, we clean up, load all of our clinic materials into our cars, and drive back to Davis. On clinic day, we have provided health care for a few more individuals who usually do not have the resources to address their basic health care needs.