Creating Spaces

This post is written by Yenling Yang.

Yenling serves as a Health Educator at Fantus and Cicero Health Centers.

At our clinic, space is an issue. Our patient rooms allow 3 people to fit comfortably and that is assuming the patient is on the examination table. Two of our administrative offices are shared between clinic staff and numerous residents and/or medical students. The education station takes up a portion of our billing clerk's "office," which faces lots of traffic anyways because the "office" is a hallway. We share our waiting room with another clinic and when we hold walk-in hours, it's not uncommon to see patients standing against the wall.

Furthermore, not only is physical space limited, but figuratively as well. Due to the high volume of patients that our clinic caters to, patients can easily lose their space to talk. Despite the fact that our medical staff do their best to give our patients time to express their concerns, at times, a patient's space to speak may be limited because another patient also needs his or her space to speak. As a result, my position was created in order to help create new spaces - spaces in which one can freely and honestly talk without constraints. As a health educator who sees patients before they see other medical staff, I give patients room to speak about themselves, to express worries, to relay their struggles, to state that they're comfortable within their bodies, or to simply state that they're happy. Many people take advantage, and as a result, these conversations begin to illustrate our patients as whole beings with lives beyond our clinic, as opposed to individualized body parts that say little about the body they belong to.

Because our clinic is a family planning clinic, the conversations that I have with my patients are usually about personal issues. One of the first questions I ask patients after introductions is "what are you thinking about in terms of birth control? Some birth control? No birth control? Maybe birth control?" Periods can come up. Talk of partners may come up. Sexual practices may also enter the conversation. Therefore, it's understandable that some people may not feel comfortable divulging such information. After much effort has been put into creating spaces for people to talk, how can our clinic serve patients who do not talk?

I have put out a question box. Patients write their question on a piece of paper and submit it to the box. Health educators from our clinic answer the question and post the answers on Facebook. Everything is anonymous - no names, no faces, no identities. In this way, we create a safe space for those who don't want a name or a face of an identity. Initially, it seemed counterintuitive to why my position was created. My position was created to learn more about patients as individuals beings. However, even though the question box has stripped away the individuality, it highlights the thoughts of the community. By knowing what the community is thinking, we can develop solutions that are at the community level; in other words, these solutions can be more expansive, more inclusive, and more likely to generate solidarity amongst community members. In doing so, my hope is to empower a community to be a safe, open, and honest space, not only for individuals of our clinic, but for those who may simply need someone to listen.