Med Students To Make Inner-City 'House Calls'
INDIANAPOLIS - On any given day during the week, students at the Indiana
University School of Medicine don their traditional white coats and learn
how to master the use of stethoscopes and other tools of their future
trade. On Easter eve, they will put on work clothes, roll up their sleeves
and wield lawnmowers, rakes, shovels and paint brushes to help some needy
folks.
Students are readying for the annual Spring House Calls, Saturday, April
19, an activity that teams students with homeowners in the near westside
area of Haughville and Blackburn, just minutes away from the medical school.
The students will rally at a community facility, Christamore House, before
fanning out in teams to do yard work, minor repairs, painting and planting
flowers.
"At the heart of medicine is the idea of service," says Varon
Cantrell, a second-year medical student who is helping organize this year's
project. "With that in mind, we are able to serve our local community
in a capacity other than in a clinical setting. We take pride in our work
and we take even more pride in the relationships we have established with
homeowners in recent years."
Other medical students coordinating this year's program are Frances Contreras,
Beena Parbhu, Marc Lazzaro, Laura Cluxton and Toni Lin.
The Spring House Calls program was launched in 1996 and is a project
under the auspices of the School's Office of Medical Service-Learning.
Since that time, nearly 600 students have volunteered more than 5,000
hours of service to the program. Students typically say their experiences
in helping others prepare them to become more community-minded physicians.
Patricia Keener, M.D., professor of pediatrics and assistant dean of
OMSL, shares a similar belief. "Students participating in Spring
House Calls and similar volunteer initiatives learn the value of community
service and, as a result, are more likely to become leading advocates
for health-care policies to improve health-care delivery to the public."
For more information about the IU School of Medicine's Office of Medical
Service-Learning, go to http://medicine.iu.edu/~omsl/.
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Media Contact: Joe Stuteville
317-274-7722
jstutevi@iupui.edu
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