To Our Children’s Future With Health, Inc.
Title: To Our Children’s Future With Health Summer Achievers
Student Interns:
Fatimah Al Dulaimee
Temple University, School of Podiatry
Anna Friedman
Temple University, Lewis Katz School of Medicine
Academic Preceptor:
Jerome Wright, MSW, LSW
Temple University, Lewis Katz School of Medicine
Community Preceptor:
Charmaine Sudler Milligan
Director of Services
To Our Children’s Future With Health, Inc.
Community Site:
This site provides a six-week summer day camp for students in the 1st through 8th grades from Bethune Elementary School at the Kenderton Elementary School location. For the morning sessions, the Philadelphia School District provides English language arts and math lessons taught by a teacher from the district. To Our Children’s Future With Health (TOCFWH) provides afternoon programming and weekly Friday day trips, typically out of Philadelphia. Students engage in physically active, creative, and science-learning activities in the afternoon led by TOCFWH staff. Free breakfast and lunch are provided by the Philadelphia School District and TOCFWH, respectively.
Team’s Experience:
The Bridging the Gaps interns worked with staff to keep students engaged during the morning academic sessions led by an assigned Bethune Elementary School teacher. The interns created and led health-oriented, student-driven workshops, facilitating discussions and interactive experiments with 5th through 8th graders on topics such as oral hygiene, smoking, and nutrition and fiber. On other days, the interns helped students design and create original fashion pieces for the program’s first fashion and talent show. The interns also led various team-building activities with their assigned student groups and supported students throughout the day.
Reflections
In spending the summer in North Philadelphia with TOCFWH, I was able to familiarize myself more with the obstacles that students, staff, and their families face on a daily basis and, as a result, how and what they tend to prioritize. Many students are aware of what living a healthy life entails and can easily answer questions regarding their health and healthy living. However, there’s then a disconnect in what is most easily accessible to them. In this matter, I recognize that as a future health provider, successful healthcare is one rooted in solutions reliant on considering the resources and living conditions of each individual. This will allow me to be, most importantly, a better listener to understand the situation of each individual and, secondly, a doctor that individuals are likely to follow up with. Far too often, continuity in healthcare is halted when patients feel a disconnect between them and their provider. My aim is to diminish such outcomes. Working with my students, I learned such an aim is only achievable by prioritizing each patient and their circumstances to create a personalized care plan. Working with my students, I also learned to slow down and not assume everyone knows what I’m talking about. When I was explaining how much fiber my students should be having daily, one of my students, Omar, asked what grams are. In that question, I was happy he was comfortable pausing the lesson to ask questions, but I also recognized that as I continue my path to medicine and enter my career, my responsibility must also include a commitment to understanding, to minimize the medical jargon barrier and rather focus on ensuring that each concept is understood by my patients.
Fatimah Al Dulaimee
Bridging the Gaps, and specifically working at TOCFWH, has informed my future practice as a physician from an interpersonal and community health perspective. Spending this summer with these students, coworkers, and community members enabled me to build supportive relationships important to working alongside and serving any community. The Bridging the Gaps weekly learning sessions further emphasized to me that systemic change can start at the microscopic level with relationships built on patience, curiosity, and trust, like the relationships I’ve gotten the opportunity to cultivate this summer.
Working specifically with this North Philadelphia community revealed various social determinants of health that affect my students, their families, and my coworkers’ lives. This experience greatly informs the way I want to approach health information and education as a provider, considering and integrating patient circumstances and environments. In summary, the Bridging the Gaps program enabled me to form meaningful connections with students and coworkers and structured learning and reflection to contend with how I will approach systemic issues affecting my patients throughout my career.
Anna Friedman
