What if a small part of that next healthcare workforce were the 11 million college students in this country?.
What if a small part of that next healthcare workforce were the 11 million college students in this country? Unencumbered by clinical responsibilities, unwilling to take no for an answer from those bureaucracies that tend to crush patients, and with an unparalleled ability for information retrieval honed through years of using Google.
11:39
Now lest you think it improbable that a college volunteer can make this kind of commitment, I have two words for you: March Madness. The average NCAA Division I mens basketball player dedicates 39 hours a week to his sport. Now we may think thats good or bad, but in either case its real. And Health Leads is based on the presumption that for too long we have asked too little of our college students when it comes to real impact in vulnerable communities. College sports teams say, “Were going to take dozens of hours at some field across campus at some ungodly hour of the morning and were going to measure your performance, and your teams performance, and if you dont measure up or you dont show up, were going to cut you off the team. But well make huge investments in your training and development, and well give you an extraordinary community of peers.” And people line up out the door just for the chance to be part of it.
12:35
So our feeling is, if its good enough for the rugby team, its good enough for health and poverty. Health Leads too recruits competitively, trains intensively, coaches professionally, demands significant time, builds a cohesive team and measures results — a kind of Teach for America for healthcare.
12:54
Now in the top 10 cities in the U.S. with the largest number of Medicaid patients, each of those has at least 20,000 college students. New York alone has half a million college students. And this isnt just a sort of short-term workforce to connect patients to basic resources, its a next generation healthcare leadership pipeline whove spent two, three, four years in the clinic waiting room talking to patients about their most basic health needs. And they leave with the conviction, the ability and the efficacy to realize our most basic aspirations for health care. And the thing is, theres thousands of these folks already out there.
13:32
So Mia Lozada is Chief Resident of Internal Medicine at UCSF Medical Center, but for three years as an undergraduate she was a Health Leads volunteer in the clinic waiting room at Boston Medical Center. Mia says, “When my classmates write a prescription, they think their work is done. When I write a prescription, I think, can the family read the prescription? Do they have transportation to the pharmacy? Do they have food to take with the prescription? Do they have insurance to fill the prescription? Those are the questions I learned at Health Leads, not in medical school.”
14:06
Now none of these solutions — the prescription pad, the electronic medical record, the waiting room, the army of college students — are perfect. But they are ours for the taking — simple examples of the vast under-utilized healthcare resources that, if we reclaimed and redeployed, could realize our most basic aspiration of healthcare.
14:30
So I had been at Legal Services for about nine months when this idea of Health Leads started percolating in my mind. And I knew I had to tell Jeff Purcell, my attorney, that I needed to leave. And I was so nervous, because I thought he was going to be disappointed in me for abandoning our clients for some crazy idea. And I sat down with him and I said, “Jeff, I have this idea that we could mobilize college students to address patients most basic health needs.” And Ill be honest, all I wanted was for him to not be angry at me. But he said this, “Rebecca, when you have a vision, you have an obligation to realize that vision. You must pursue that vision.” And I have to say, I was like “Whoa. Thats a lot of pressure.” I just wanted a blessing, I didnt want some kind of mandate. But the truth is Ive spent every waking minute nearly since then chasing that vision.
