Shifa Clinic is a health care facility that serves all people of limited financial resources and marginal access to healthcare within the greater Oklahoma City metropolitan area. I first heard of Shifa Clinic in the fall of 2016, while eating shawarma with one of my friends. We were sharing some of the experiences we had gone through since the two of us had last met. I mentioned the volunteer work I had done at hospitals until that point: my weekly responsibilities mostly consisted of cleaning patient beds and running tasks for nurses. This volunteering was certainly rewarding, and I have nothing but respect for the nurses and fellow volunteers I worked with, but it lacked the level of interaction with patients that I sought. Hearing this, my friend told me about a clinic where he volunteered, a clinic that had recently opened up in Oklahoma City. He invited me to go with him one weekend and I was eager to take him up on that offer. And so, he introduced me to Shifa Clinic.
Shifa Clinic OKC was opened up with support from the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); this organization is involved in a wide variety of relief and community services across the United States: shelters, food pantries, skill development programs, disaster relief, and health clinics such as Shifa, which provide free care to uninsured, low-income patients. The entire clinic is funded by donations and is entirely volunteer-run from the physicians to the pharmacists to the students. Most of my time there is spent as a triage volunteer, meaning I am responsible for taking patient vitals and recording their background information. It took me a few weeks to learn how to properly triage incoming patients, developing not only the physical skills associated with taking vitals, but also more subtle skills such as how I spoke with patients. If I was told by a patient that they felt pain, I learned to ask them to elaborate: where was the pain, how intense was it, when did it hurt, what kind of pain was is, etc.. As time passed, I grew more comfortable speaking with others, offering comfort when needed, and asking patients to describe their problems. One of the first patients I saw made an offhand comment about seeing figures that others could not see. Had I not recorded this and pressed him further on this matter, he might not have been diagnosed with schizophrenia until much later on.
The longer I stayed at Shifa Clinic, the closer my relationships with the doctors and my fellow volunteers became. I was eventually shown how to run simple procedures like measuring blood sugar or using a monofilament test for neuropathy (something common in patients with diabetes). When I grew experienced enough, I was asked to help train new volunteers, many of them friends and classmates from OU, including other Medical Humanities Scholars. It was a great feeling to help teach skills to others, skills that I had worked hard to develop over weeks of volunteering. Yet, not all responsibilities were directly medical or patient-focused; many of them were also difficult to teach and had to be learned through experience. For example, telling a patient who came in with insurance that we could not see him was one of the more difficult tasks I had to complete. I needed to deliver the message seriously, but also in an apologetic tone while listing several nearby resources and locations that the individual could utilize. Wanting to help as many people as possible, this was particularly hard for me to say. However, I understood that I had to consider the fairness to our other patients, those who were uninsured and who would not otherwise be able to receive affordable help. With that in mind, I eventually learned to perform this responsibility as well.
Recently, I was appointed as one of two interim managers for Shifa Clinic. This meant that I would help run the clinic during times when our regular clinic manager was unable to make it. I was given this position since I had been working at the clinic consistently for over a year. The responsibilities of a manager include organizing the sign-up of weekly volunteers, making sure that lab results are printed and signed off by doctors, making sure that patient files are stored away correctly, etc. These tasks were of great importance in a manner different from the volunteering I usually did in triage. Making sure that lab forms were filled out correctly ensured sure that the tests, which could cost hundreds of dollars, were charged to us and not accidentally to the patients. Double-checking that all patient charts were accounted for and filed away, in addition to making sure that computers were logged out of our online database, helped safeguard patient confidentiality.
I am thankful for my time at Shifa Clinic and how it has helped me make a positive impact in my community. The wide range of work experience I have gained at Shifa is invaluable to me as a prospective physician (I start medical school this fall). A variety of people attend Shifa every single week: I sometimes end up speaking English, Spanish, and Urdu to different patients all within the same day. The clinic offers a source of care to those who might not be able to afford it otherwise, and the volunteers, many of them my fellow OU students, are constantly trying to expand what can be done for patients. Doctors at Shifa have recently started to perform routine pap smears and have begun to provide arm/leg braces for physical therapy. Services are expanding all the time. Shifa Clinic offers a great opportunity for undergraduates to not only become immersed in a medical setting, but to also play an active role in one as well. Undergraduates like me can reach out beyond the university to serve the community, while gaining this valuable experience. Their work helps the clinic provide the best care possible for our patients
