Camden Coalition
Title: Comprehensive Collectivist Community Care With Camden Coalition
Student Interns:
Katharine Ryan
Cooper Medical School of Rowan University
Academic Preceptor:
Mara Gordon, MD
Cooper Medical School of Rowan University
Anthony Rostain, MD, MA
Cooper Medical School of Rowan University
Community Preceptor:
Laura Sorensen
Camden Coalition
Community Site:
Camden Coalition was previously an extension of Cooper Hospital. It later became an independent, multidisciplinary nonprofit center dedicated to helping community members with complex healthcare needs overcome a wide variety of barriers to care. Its offering includes, but is not limited to, legal services, housing services, Medicaid/Medicare assistance, and clinical restructuring for addiction medicine. The Coalition also participates in advocacy work to help mitigate the underlying root causes of social and medical inequities that generate barriers to care. It has expanded its work from Camden to all of South Jersey and is one of four major hubs in the state that provide these services. The Coalition also works with other organizations across the country that do similar work and with newer groups interested in establishing their own regional hubs. This sharing of knowledge, experience, and perspectives helps strengthen the efficacy of the work and demonstrates the widespread need for humanistic, holistic care that goes beyond strictly clinical practice.
Team’s Experience:
The Bridging the Gaps intern conducted a literature review and an interview
questionnaire/survey for a qualitative research project on the implementation process of office-based addiction treatment (OBAT) and medication-based addiction treatment (MAT) by PCPs/appropriate specialists. The intern’s work also included verifying the presence or absence of NJ Medicare/Medicaid-funded community and social resources on the MyResourcePal database; dental/oral health community health worker training, including providing an overview of the connection between oral/dental and whole-body health and best practices for working with clients to encourage preventive care and habits; and attending home visits for the Housing First program, shadowing a nurse who performed wellness check-ins, checking BP and pulse rates, reviewing medications, and checking that upcoming medical appointments were appropriately scheduled.
Reflections
“Given my past career in academia, much of my prior advocacy work has focused on promoting equitable pedagogies and constructing support systems that increase that participation and retention of students of historically excluded backgrounds in STEM education and careers. This especially includes Black, brown, Indigenous, Latinx, LGBTQ, disabled, and neurodivergent students. In addition to improving accessibility, the ultimate goal of this work is to uplift marginalized perspectives that critically question, halt the reproduction, and supplant the practices and dogmas in Western STEM that historically were shaped by (and even weaponized to support and justify) capitalist-colonialist structural violence and oppression (Blakey and Watkins 2022, Liscum and Garcia 2022). Participating in Bridging the Gaps helped expand my personal knowledge and perspective on how such shifts in our healthcare education can translate into anti-racist and social justice-oriented work in clinical practice. I found our weekly didactic sessions immensely useful in teaching us about subjects ranging from medical racism to how to provide trauma-informed care. These are lessons I believe should be required of all future healthcare workers. What was most impactful was getting to see these lessons in action at my site in Camden, New Jersey: The Camden Coalition. This experience helped further develop my career goals in family and community medicine. I feel I will be better informed to care for communities with complex healthcare needs, especially that related how intersectional oppression is embodied in community and individual health (Gravlee 2009).”
Blakey, M. L., & Watkins, R. (2022). William Montague Cobb: Near the African diasporic origins of activist and biocultural anthropology. The Anatomical Record, 305(4), 838–848. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24818
Gravlee, C. C. (2009). How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 139(1), 47–57. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.20983
Liscum, M., & Garcia, M. L. (2022). You can’t keep a bad idea down: Dark history, death, and potential rebirth of eugenics. The Anatomical Record, 305(4), 902–937. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24849
Katharine Ryan