Mid Year Reflections Through Core Competencies

By February, one may easily feel lost in repetitive activities, office culture, and tedium of a 9-5 service day. Often, this is all I can think about when I get home from my Health Center or when I speak to family and friends. I do not serve with the National Health Corps just to learn how to work in an office, filling out applications. Therefore, I needed a framework to compartmentalize my AmeriCorps year for myself and how to frame my experience to others on how I have grown as I enter the second half of my service term. In our December member meeting, our program director presented on the NHC Core Competencies, a set of competencies every member should gain and expand over the term. As I try to frame my service experience for myself and others going into the second half of my term, I reflect on how these core competencies relate to my everyday service.

One of the core competencies of NHC Philadelphia is “public health practice skills”. Members are to increase their knowledge of the field in public health. My public health classes taught me keywords like “barriers to access,” “equitable health care,” “health infrastructure,” and so on in regards to the current healthcare system. I comprehended them objectively prior to entering my site as an insurance specialist, but only when I began did I realize just how interconnected, confusing, and frustrating our health systems really can be. College may have taught me  that people may not want to take the time to return with Medicaid documents because they hadn’t been accepted in the past. However hearing from a patient firsthand during my days of service, about how she was bounced from person to person over the course of several months when attempting to apply for insurance gives a glimpse in a widespread feeling of helplessness in regards to patients’ engagement in their own health care. In my position at Health Center 2, I try to ease the burden in applying for insurance for many of my patients. While the healthcare system can still be difficult to navigate, with the training and experience I have received, I try to serve as a resource for my patients.By combining formal, experiential, and personal education we can expand our public healthknowledge and ability to affect meaningful change.

One competency, civic engagement, has been one I’ve grappled  with during my year of service. Direct service can have limitations; does serving 200 meals on a Sunday effect the status of the over 5000 people living somewhere not meant for habitation? Does informing 250  people a month they cannot apply for Medicaid because of their income is just over the limit lead to an equitable health coverage? Obviously not.  For many issues volunteering can serve as a Band-Aid on endemic problems.  Nonetheless, volunteering and community-mindedness are  laudable objectives. The plethora of off-site and monthly group service projects offer opportunities to interact with other communities and experience first-hand their specific needs. For example, Books Through Bars, an organization that mails books to inmates across the state, allows me a small insight into the life of the incarcerated population.  Reading their request letters reminds me of humanity I had rarely given any thought. While volunteering may not directly affect systematic changes, we can still offer temporary aid for those who need but would otherwise not receive it.
 

This blog post was written by NHC Philadelphia member Mory Bell.
Mory serves as an Insurance Specialist for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health-Ambulatory Health Services: Health Center 2.