Reflections on a Year of Service

One of my biggest motivators when starting the service term was to be able to serve a Hispanic community and give more healthcare access to Spanish speaking patients. As a Hispanic Latina I feel it is extremely important for patients to be able to connect with their providers and health care workers and communicate with them meaningfully, so getting the chance to spend my service year in a host site that largely served a Spanish-speaking Hispanic population was a dream come true. Through my service I was able to see the importance of language access for patients when even the simplest medical tasks became big ordeals because of language barriers, such as scheduling appointments in specialty offices or hospitals. Things like finding community food pantries, housing assistance, insurance assistance etc. became even more limited as I had to find places that Spanish-speaking patients could easily navigate. It gave me a larger perspective on the unique difficulties non-English speaking people face while living in the United States and trying to access resources and aid to help them thrive in a new or foreign environment.

At Norristown specifically, with the host site being so far from the city for most people, access to resources and care becomes even more difficult, especially for the uninsured population. To try and remedy this a bit, my host site and I worked with Jefferson Hospital and their free Mammogram van program to bring the Mammogram van to Norristown and establish a relationship for them to visit the clinic regularly to offer free mammograms to uninsured patients or patients with transportation issues. It has been one of my favorite aspects of my year at the clinic and a relationship I hope will last for a long time after I move on from my service term.

Serving at Norristown has been a truly eye-opening experience. Having the opportunity to talk with so many different people and understand their stories really brought my service year into perspective and solidified my desire to pursue medicine and health care even more. Being able to make a meaningful positive impact in people’s lives has always been my goal and I feel like NHC has given me the chance to explore that goal and bring it to fruition, while also encouraging growth of those goals as I move on from my service term to medical school and beyond.