College students are a unique beast. They come and go without leaving a trace. Once in a blue moon, however, some will leave a mark on the community. Steve Bishop and other UVA medical and nursing students will do just that. They have founded Charlottesville Health Access (CHA), an agency that helps the homeless and the underserved with medical screenings and navigation through the health care system at UVA.
CHA will soon open its doors in The Haven, a hub of services for the homeless and the working poor, formerly known as the First Street Church Project, financed by Hollywood director and UVA graduate Tom Shadyac, who directed Ace Ventura.
Bishop, president of CHA’s executive board and fourth-year med student, says that the idea took root in February of 2007, when a group of students met and conducted a health fair at PACEM, a homeless shelter. From that event, students and shelter advocates witnessed the need of basic medical services for the homeless population. “Through that, I recruited a couple of medical student colleagues and we held a community round table,” says Bishop. “We sort of came up with the idea that there are plenty of resources in Charlottesville and it’s just that we can’t get the homeless to access them.”
Practically, CHA offers aid in filling out prescriptions, making appointments and referrals, assisting a person with financial screening and medical record forms and providing transportation to medical appointments, among other things.
“It’s a great educational component for the students,” says Kimberly Farish, CHA’s executive director and former director of medical assistance program and emergency services at the Salvation Army. “It gives them the opportunity to learn to work with this population and I feel it helps them become better physicians and better nurses, because they look at the whole person.”
Essentially, CHA will be a “navigation center,” where people in the community who need assistance to get through the complicated UVA system can meet with a navigator.
“This person wouldn’t necessarily diagnose the illness, but do intake work, where we discover what [the person’s] current health care needs are and then we would assist them to meet those needs,” Bishop says.
CHA will also help its client financially with a prescription assistance program funded by Blue Moon Fund and the J&E Berkley Foundation.
Currently close to 15 med students volunteer for CHA. “We give some groundwork of what sort of health care issues homeless people face,” says Bishop.
While CHA is in no way officially associated with UVA, Bishop says that medical students were involved with PACEM even before the health fairs in 2007. “Charlottesville Health Access started though the Social Issues in Medicine course,” at the UVA Medical School, says Bishop.
In Charlottesville, the need to provide health care assistance is significant. “I think there is a huge need and it was fairly obvious when I was volunteering with PACEM and before we started CHA, that a lot of guys needed simple things,” such as help filling out a prescription and going to a doctor’s appointment, says Bishop. “Since we started, we have helped dozens of people meet those simple needs, and their health improved tremendously.”
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