Many people in the populated Triangle area take accessible health-care for granted. A short one- to two-hour drive from Durham, however, there are communities where indoor plumbing is not a standard and a single doctor can serve as many as 2,000 residents.
It its almost 20-year history, The North Carolina Student Rural Health Coalition has sent undergraduates, doctors and medical students from Duke and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to assist these areas.
"The main goal is to allow people to care for themselves. The whole purpose is empowerment," said Trinity sophomore Amit Kumar, co-coordinator of the Duke undergraduate chapter of NCSRHC.
Each chapter of NCSRHC has its own leaders who are responsible for mobilizing their membership. There are chapters for UNC and Duke undergraduates, as well as medical students at Duke, East Carolina and UNC.
Doctors and medical students provide basic services such as blood pressure readings, blood-sugar tests, breast exams, cholesterol tests and general medical exams. All services are free, Kumar said, except for the cholesterol test, which costs six dollars.
Kumar explained that undergraduates, since they cannot perform medical examinations, help by doing a door-to-door community outreach the week before a clinic is held. Then, on the day of a clinic-which are usually held in a church or community center-undergraduates distribute health information materials and babysit children while their parents are examined. Undergraduates can also help by fundraising to support the organization.
Kumar explained there are 30 to 40 undergraduates currently involved in the chapter.
The NCSRHC also works on environmental issues with the communities they are involved in as many of these communities are polluted from hog farms. Sonali Kulkarni, a Trinity junior and co-coordinator of the undergraduate chapter, said she joined the organization after becoming concerned about the problems of poverty and of racial and environmental injustice.
"In different ways, each of these issues influences health care access." she said. "I think Duke students need to be aware of such problems and should play a role in fixing them."
The School of Medicine currently has about thirty students involved in the program. Most are in their first or third year, according to Jamila Martin, a third-year medical student at Duke and co-coordinator of the Medical School chapter.
She explained that second- and fourth-year medical students typically do not have enough time to participate in the program.
Brian Smith, also a third-year medical student and a co-coordinator, said he does NCSRHC because it is a, "well-run organization. The students feel needed."
He also explained that first-year students get involved because the program allows them to see patients early in their Medical School careers.
Kumar added NCSRHC also has a pre-health careers internship in which they take high school students from these communities and encourage them to pursue medical or public health careers.
To raise awareness for their cause, the chapter is holding a symposium Friday night at 6 p.m. in the Women's Center.
Guest speakers will include the "Newtown Florist Club," a group of women who became environmental activists after discovering that pollution had caused many premature deaths in their Georgia community. One member of the group chronicled their struggle in a book called The Newtown Story: One Community's Fight for Environmental Justice. Other issues of children's health and environmental injustice will also be discussed.
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