St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, Center for the Urban Child
Title: Pediatric Community Health Navigators
Student Interns:
Kyle Chan
Drexel University College of Medicine
Rahul Rawat
Drexel University College of Medicine
Academic Preceptor:
Stacy Ellen, DO, FAAP
Drexel University College of Medicine, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children
Community Preceptor:
Renee Kottenhahn, MD
Drexel University College of Medicine, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children
Community Site:
The Center for the Urban Child (CUC) is an expansive outpatient facility on the St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children | Tower Health campus. There, a multidisciplinary team cares for many families who face complex challenges due to financial, social, educational, and cultural barriers to care.
Team’s Experience:
The Bridging the Gaps interns worked as health navigators at the CUC, connecting patients and families with resources that can improve their health and safety, provide essential developmental screening to assist physicians’ diagnoses, and counsel families on the importance of reading and oral health. The interns’ main project was creating a handout on child development, its relevance for families (particularly those caring for children with special needs), and cost-effective strategies families can use to reduce risk. In developing the handout, the interns visited the equipment clinic and shadowed physical and occupational therapists to better understand the process of ordering adaptive safety equipment for children with special needs. They also researched low-cost home strategies, including homemade stop signs, door locks and bells, ID tags, neighbor awareness, and structured outdoor exploration for safety training. Additionally, the interns created a physician-focused flyer on the specifics of how and when to use the equipment clinic. In a related project, the interns researched instructional videos demonstrating how to securely fasten a gun lock and formatted the information into an attractive, easy-to-understand flyer for families.
Reflections
Over the course of this summer, my time at St. Christopher’s Center of the Urban Child has been as much a lesson in the limits of a single resource list as it has been a lesson in the depth of human resilience. Each week brought a new layer of understanding—about the neighborhood, about the families we serve, about my colleagues, and about myself. Looking back across these six weeks, a few consistent threads emerge: the gap between the resources we can offer and the needs families actually have, the importance of persistence and follow-through, the value of a diverse team, and a shift in how I understand the behavior of the young people I work with. I also experienced the arduous process that came with creating and editing a resource that received a plethora of feedback. The challenges came with navigating differing suggestions from two different departments while honoring the individual vision we had as interns. I’m leaving this program with a better understanding of the systems families navigate, a stronger appreciation for the team it takes to actually move someone through those systems, and a new lens, thanks to Dr. Ginsburg, for understanding the people, young and old, who might be pushing me away precisely when they need support the most. As I move forward in medicine, I hope to carry all of it with me: the empathy, the persistence, and the humility to keep learning.
Kyle Chan
Working with BTG in North Kensington, where roughly 80% of the families we serve are on Medicaid, reshaped how I understand and practice medicine. Walking into a patient’s room before the resident, introducing myself, and screening families for social needs like housing stability, food access, and safety at home taught me that trust with patients depends as much on how you ask as what you ask, a lesson deeper than anything I’d practiced in FPC sessions. Our practice has a tradition of ringing a bell when a family has no identified social needs, which rings only a couple of times a year. Rather than demotivating me, it instilled a sense of urgency to make every visit count, whether that meant handing out a toothbrush, a helmet, a book, or a resource newsletter, small things I once would have underestimated but now recognize as carrying real weight for families with few resources. The projects I took on with Kyle pushed that growth further: researching and designing an elopement safety flyer deepened my understanding of the daily challenges facing children with autism and their families, while creating a bilingual gun lock handout confronted me with the reality that firearm injury is now the leading cause of death among children in the U.S. and taught me that a resource families can’t read is a resource they can’t use—a hard lesson in health equity. I also grew professionally by helping bridge communication gaps within the hospital itself, creating a reference guide after realizing the pediatric equipment clinic was underused simply because physicians didn’t know what it offered, which showed me that gaps in patient care aren’t always clinical but often organizational. Throughout, BTG was a real job with real accountability, filling a niche nobody else had the bandwidth to cover, meeting deadlines that affected the clinical workflow, and learning to hold myself to a professional standard even without anyone checking over my shoulder, which taught me the difference between doing good work out of passion and doing good work because people are depending on you. Looking back, BTG has changed how I show up in every patient room: I listen first, and I stay conscious not just of the experience a family has, but of the tangible difference they leave with, whether that’s a toothbrush, a safety flyer, or simply the feeling of being heard, which is the version of medicine I want to practice.
Rahul Rawat
