Puentes de Salud
Title: Bridging Health: Puentes de Salud
Student Interns:
Noah DiBiasio-Hudson
University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine
Academic Preceptor:
Hillary R. Bogner, MD, MSCE
University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine
Donald L. Boyer, MD, MSEd
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Community Preceptor:
Sharon Katzenbach, CRNP
Puentes de Salud
D. Daphne Owen, MD
Puentes de Salud
Annette Silva, RN
Puentes de Salud
Community Site:
Puentes de Salud is a community resource center in south/central Philadelphia, designed to foster the overall wellness of the Latinx community by providing health and social services in one centralized location. Puentes offers low-cost clinical services including primary care, urgent care, women’s healthcare, dental care, and routine screenings/preventive care. Its wellness services include therapy, case management, food access support, social work, and legal services. Puentes de Salud also offers educational and arts-based programs for community members. Founded on a commitment to health justice and addressing social determinants of health, Puentes partners with local organizations and universities to provide empowering, high-quality services to members of the community.
Team’s Experience:
The Bridging the Gaps student intern served as an interpreter during patient appointments, took vitals, and supported intake as patients arrived. Working in the on-site lab, the intern expanded their phlebotomy skills and knowledge of outpatient care management. The intern’s project this summer was to create a comprehensive guidebook and poster with instructions, tips, and key phrases for volunteer students in the intake/vitals role. Over the past year, staff at Puentes have noticed that student volunteers have extremely variable education and backgrounds with regard to taking appropriate vitals. This has led to avoidable errors in the critical data our providers use to diagnose and treat patients, as well as substantial confusion and data inconsistencies. Through collaborative work with Puentes staff and other volunteer students, the BTG intern created an internal resource to support the consistent and high-quality patient care Puentes is known for.
Reflections
“Though I began volunteering at Puentes de Salud in September 2024, this summer was when I really began to feel like a part of the team. I looked forward to work every day and was consistently humbled by the energy, passion, and joy with which everyone at Puentes engages, even during an extraordinarily difficult moment for both the team and the community we serve. This experience galvanized my commitment to building a career in community-based healthcare and emphasized the value of whole-person, integrated health models. The Puentes model is vastly different from in-hospital care — the amount of interpersonal care, networking, and resource leveraging that goes into caring for patients at Puentes is enormous and impressive. For me it raises the question: If models like Puentes’s naturally attract/create a culture of generosity and humanized care, how can we take lessons from that model and adapt them to be integrated into existing healthcare institutions? In a hyper-specialized and subdivided healthcare system, how do we refocus on human dignity and connective care?”
Noah DiBiasio-Hudson