Riverside Free Clinic: Volunteer Engagement and Community Healthcare

This episode promotes the Riverside Free Clinic (RFC), a community clinic led by Southern Inland Empire students. The RFC aims to connect community members with wrap-around healthcare services while engaging students eager to serve their community. Join Stephanie Sandoval, a Health Educator, and Selina Hernandez, a Community Relations Specialist at the UCR School of Medicine Center for Healthy Communities, as they explore the services offered by the Riverside Free Clinic and the opportunities for students to volunteer. You will also hear from Adamari and Donna, who both volunteer as Research Officers at the clinic.

Link: riversidefreeclinic.com/en/

Transcript

Stephanie: Hello everyone and welcome to Healthy Disruptions, the podcast that raises awareness on pressing health disparities. This episode will cover the importance of free clinics on the health of underserved communities. Get ready to dive deep into this important topic, because we're about to learn some great information.

Stephanie: I'm Stephanie Sandoval, Health Educator at the Center for Healthy Communities, your host for today. And joining me as Selina Hernandez, Community Relations Specialists at the Center for Health Disparities Research. 

Selina: Thanks for the introduction, Stephanie. In today’s episode, we will be discussing a local free clinic that was established by some very bright students right here in Riverside California. 

Stephanie: However, before we bring in members from the free clinic, we want to provide our listeners with some background information. More and more people in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties are going without health insurance, which is not a good sign because when people don't have insurance, they're less likely to go to the doctor for check-ups and to take steps to prevent health problems. This often means that children and adults might not be getting the best healthcare they need and are at risk for developing chronic illnesses or diseases. 

Selina: In efforts to connect communities with access to FREE health and wellness care for everyone regardless of insurance or citizenship status, a group of young individuals took the initiative and established The Riverside Free Clinic also known as RCF. RCF is a nonprofit organization that provides free wrap-around health and wellness care to the underserved populations of the Inland Empire every other Wednesday from 5:00 – 7:00 pm at the First Congregational Church of Riverside on Mission Inn Ave – we will provide the schedule and address information in the show notes for those of you who are interested in attending (3504 Mission Inn Ave., Riverside CA 92501). 

Stephanie: Thanks for mentioning that, Selina. I would also like to add that in providing these services, RCF also presents the opportunity for direct hands-on training for future healthcare professionals in medical, graduate, or undergraduate students. So basically, the Riverside Free Clinic has two main aspects to it, 1) providing services to the community free of charge and 2) offering training to future healthcare professionals. 

Stephanie: We are fortunate to have two members from the Riverside Free Clinic to provide more insight into the clinic and services. Please welcome Donna Alghizzi and Adamaris Macias Cardona. We’d love to allow you both to say a few words before we dive deeper into our discussion.

Donna: Thank you for having us. It's quite amazing to be a part of this. I can't wait to answer all your questions. My name is Donna. And yeah, we're really excited to be a part of this. And we're really curious to see what you guys would like to know about RFC. 

Stephanie: Thank you both so much for joining us today. We're super excited to learn more about RFC. So my first question to you all is, we understand that the clinic is student led, can you please explain what interested you in joining RFC and how long you plan to be a part of this clinic? 

Donna: Yeah, of course. So our FC works for the underrepresented community within the Inland Empire. The undergraduate students and other students involved learn more about the health disparities and the importance of readily available health care within our community. For us undergraduate students specifically, it really allows us to be better prepared for the future, as a lot of us do want to work with patients. And more importantly, we want to work with patients with varying identities and backgrounds that might change a patient's circumstances. And accounting for those aspects in a controlled setting with providers, students and teachers, allows us to try to give the best services possible to the Inland Empire and community around us. For many of the undergraduate students, we have the option of working in the clinic, up to three years, even post grad. So it's a wonderful opportunity. And it's a long term commitment that really allows us to get involved with the community. And I think that's one of the biggest appeals to RFC for many students across undergraduate medical, pharmacy and even nursing. 

Selina: Yeah, thanks for that breakdown. So our listeners are probably curious about the services that RFC provides. Can you provide a more in depth explanation about it? 

Donna: Of course, so RFC really does pride on the services we've grown a lot over the last decade. We currently are offering medical, dental psychiatric services as well as counseling within the last few years, we've been able to partner up with Planned Parenthood, HIV testing and we've been able to have lab services and medication for many of our patients, especially ones with chronic conditions such as diabetes or hypertension. As an undergraduate one of my points of pride is our committees which are made up of undergraduate students. So those committees involve nutrition, social services, stress relief, dermatology, and more. If you'd like to learn about the specific committees RFC, feel free to reach out to our website or Instagram but the services that we offer we really try to get a all around health care so that any patient is coming to RFC. Even if they don't need all the services at the moment, there's at least one or two that they can account for RFC does, again work with an underrepresented community. And oftentimes a community without medical insurance, or sometimes they only have medical insurance for medical services and not Dental, or their medical insurance will only cover this or they don't have any at all. So for us, and a big point of pride is really, really making sure we have kind of that all around health care available for our patients. 

Stephanie: Thank you so much, Donna, it's wonderful to hear how much RFC has expanded and you're not only have you know those health care services, but you're offering a more holistic approach to healthcare. So that's wonderful. And in regards to the clinic, does the schedule always stay the same? Does it change ever or is it just every other Wednesday? Or how does that work? How do you determine your schedule?

Donna: So for us, our clinic tends to stay every other Wednesday, we usually are taking patients from five to 7pm, depending on the day. For updates on those, of course, please reach out to our Instagram at UCR RFC or to our website to get the specifics or updates on the clinic, I would really recommend Instagram as we try to post to every upcoming clinic. The exact services we offer, whether it be Planned Parenthood HIV services, sometimes we get special social services coming into CES. The reason we make it every other Wednesday is so we are always prepared for the next clinic and we are always able to, you know, bring our best quality and bring our best efforts. Again, we work because we work to always improve our clinic. So kind of having that week, every other week for the clinic allows us to kind of work and improve every time our patients are able to visit us. All right. 

Selina: So earlier you said you mentioned the several committees that are part of RFC Can you please elaborate where those committees are? Or how they help with clinic flow things of that nature? 

Donna: Yeah, of course. So first, I really want to highlight our committees because we have grown a lot. We have diabetes, fundraising, hygiene, intake, labs, lung health, medical, spanish needs, pharmacy, research, which is me and Adamaris, social services, and stress relief. So you can imagine that there's quite a few committees and quite a few teams of undergraduate students. I think the importance of the committees is that we can really get to work with medical students and providers to improve and bring more needs to the clinic. So the new committee that we actually implemented this year is the dermatology committee as the clinic and RFC kind of recognize the audience and the need for skin health education as well as skin cancer prevention within the Inland Empire community that I used to work for was specifically labs. And we help the medical students with either recording or administrating lab work from my experience and I think many other members of RFC can agree with me that the committees are a great way for the undergraduate students to interact with the patients in a very safe setting, as well as allowing them to shatter the medical students and what the providers are doing for educational needs. But I think more importantly, the committee's really are a wonderful resource for us to support our own teams such as pharmacy, the medical staff or the nursing staff. While they're focusing on the patient's needs and their health concerns, we are able to help the patients with other needs they might have or other concerns they might have, you know, we represent an underserved population again. So things like social services, hygiene, even Labs is really, really important for these people or excuse me, for these patients that we work with, because these are services are not usually offered to them. And again, undergraduate students being able to provide these services gives us an opportunity to be able to educate them as well as kind of learn within our own experiences. And again, to have the medical staff focus on the patient's health concerns. 

Stephanie: Thank you so much Donna for elaborating on that. It sounds like RFC is a wonderful opportunity for students to become involved. And our audience would probably be very curious to know, as a medical graduate or undergraduate student who's interested in volunteering. How do I go about joining RFC? What's the whole application process? 

Adamaris: Thank you for asking that for applying to be an undergraduate volunteer with RFC, you have to be either a second, third or fourth year, but you have to be a rising fourth year. So if you're a fourth year now and you're interested in applying to be part of RFC within your gap year, I'm so sorry, but you are not eligible to apply. So applications open out during spring quarter, and they close within a month. So it's good to be updated with our Instagram because we'll post about when applications close information, the info night so usually it's on a Saturday and late at night where we'll hold a essentially a meeting with everyone on the committee officers where you can come and ask questions, see what you would be interested in volunteering with. 

Selina: Thanks for sharing the process of just you know, applying to be a volunteer at RFC. So could you please explain like as a first time patient, can you walk us through the walk in process and what's the best way to prepare for a visit or are there any items that someone should bring when they are visiting? 

Adamaris: Course so I was part of of the medical Spanish committee for two years. So I know very closely how this all works. If you are a Spanish speaker, and you are afraid that you might not have the resources necessary or that someone will be able to translate for you, please don't be afraid we're there for you to help. And so essentially, first thing is you would walk in, and you check in. So that would be called intake intake, it would be really, really helpful if you could bring in identification. So like an ID and a license, anything that shows your name, your address, your zip codes, something like that. But if you do not have something like this, say, for example, it's someone who's experiencing homelessness, it's not something that is necessary, we do have a little whiteboard where you could write down this information, and then we'll put it in. And then after intake, the patient would wait in the waiting area for the name to be called. And then the nursing student would come and call their name, and then they would get their vitals checked. And then after that, they would see the medical student. And then the medical student does an assessment of what they need or what they came for. And meanwhile, we have other committees such as the ones Donna mentioned earlier. So for example, if they are in need of food banks, or they need housing arrangement, or something like that, we do have social services on site that can help with that. We also have a little Committee, which is for stress relief, say someone who has a child, we have little like toys for them to play with and things like that. So it's very much a welcoming and safe environment for all our patients, we know that it can be a very long process. So just know that you could a patient could be there from one hour to three hours, depending on how many patients we are seeing some kind of sometimes we get a lot of patients. So on those days, you might have a longer wait time. So it's very important that a patient that is considering to attend, that they might want to lock out the night. So maybe from like five to 10, just make sure that you're free. I'm not saying that everyone finishes at 10. But if you if you get there later, you might get out later. And then at the end the doctors who oversees everything, the medical student cheats to the doctor. And then if they need medication or follow ups that will be explained to the to the patient. 

Stephanie: Thank you so much for walking us through the clinic flow process from a patient perspective, it was really helpful for us to get a better understanding of it. And I had a question. So it's our understanding that RFC has an annual banquet. Can you please explain the importance of the community supporting RFC and these types of events for us. 

Donna: So thankfully, we partner up with the country club. And here we hold this banquet, essentially to commemorate everything that our communities do because we are a community, it's a lot of undergraduate volunteers, medical students, nursing students, physicians on hand, which volunteer their time, there are Wednesdays, every other Wednesday, will  be there. So we're just there to celebrate everything that we've done throughout the year. But it also serves as a fundraising opportunity. So we encourage everyone to come out as you raise money that will provide the services that we provide for our patients. So with this, we'll buy either supplies or medications, and go on from there. Also, it's really, really beautiful place. If you ever get the chance and you see that it's going on please join us. 

Selina: And then are there any other things you or you both wish to share about RST that we did not cover with the listeners? 

Adamaris: Yes, I would as a Hispanic myself if you are afraid to go out and get care because you feel like your doctor not might not understand you or your doctor doesn't understand your cultural perspective and where you're coming from or things like that. I want to make it very clear that RFC we understand you and we're here to serve you, our doctors on hand. Two of them I know speak Spanish and they're really fluent. And so if for some reason you might have questions, they could answer them directly. So just know that we're here to serve you and to care for you because we want to make our our medically underserved area better since we understand the struggles personally as a lot of

Donna: Yeah so for anyone in the community if you need any type of health service, please, please please feel free to combat come to RFC, our medical providers and all the students there are really there to learn and try to become the best medical providers that we can be the services that we offer is for the benefit of the community. And we always try to to the best of our ability to offer as much as we can to our patients because we do recognize the underserved

population within the Inland Empire and we believe in health equity. Regardless of age, gender status, anyone needs a health service and RFC seems like a viable option. Please come and visit us whether you are a returning or a new patient. And make sure you stay updated on our Instagram @UCRRFC or on our website as well for the next upcoming clinic and services that we may provide. 

Stephanie: Thank you so much Donna and Adamaris for being here today and representing the Riverside free clinic  and providing such wonderful and valuable information to all of our listeners.