San Francisco Free Clinic, San Francisco, CA
This summer, I had the great fortune of working at the San Francisco Free Clinic, a medical clinic that offers entirely cost-free healthcare for uninsured residents of San Francisco, the surrounding Bay Area, and beyond. There, I met an incredible staff of physicians, nurses, medical assistants, and administrators that helped me grow both professionally and personally. At the free clinic, I worked as both a medical assistant and an administrator, performing tasks as needed such as placing injections, taking patient vital signs, answering phones at the front desk, and any other odd jobs around the office.
Right from the beginning of my summer it was clear that I was working at a place where the staff truly cared about their work. The free clinic was founded in 1993, when Drs. Patricia ’82 and Richard Gibbs decided to quit their successful private practice in downtown San Francisco and open up a new type of clinic, one without the burdens of insurance and payment plans, so that they could focus entirely on healthcare. From there, thanks to support from the medical community of physicians, hospitals, and other medical facilities, as well as generous donations from residents of San Francisco, the free clinic has grown to accept more than 2,000 patients per year. The staff is made up of incredible people who believe in the cause started by the Gibbs, and they were always able to put patients first and care for them as well as any paid clinic would.
The free clinic also acts as a teaching clinic, bringing in third and fourth-year medical students and first-year residents who see patients and give reports to the attending physicians, thereby both learning from the physicians and providing healthcare to patients. As someone who aspires to go to medical school, this gave me an excellent opportunity to talk to students who are just a few years further along in the process than I am. It was enlightening to hear about their paths from undergraduate school to medical school to residency, and gave me some great insight into what my life would be like if I followed in their footsteps.
In addition, the free clinic’s role as a teaching clinic benefited me in that every doctor, nurse, and medical assistant was happy to take time to explain things to me and teach me a variety of skills, including drawing blood and placing injections. Even the attending physicians, who always had mountains of work to do, took the time to meet with me occasionally and answer any questions I had. The clinic also thrives on peer-to-peer teaching, and I was happy to both learn from volunteers who had been coming to the free clinic for years and mentor new volunteers who started working at the clinic while I was there.
Another important aspect of my time at the free clinic was the time I was able to spend shadowing doctors as they interacted with patients. I learned about how the physicians asked for patient history, listened to the patients’ complaints, and offered a diagnosis and treatment plan, all while communicating clearly and concisely with the patients. I was impressed with the way the physicians were able to connect to their patients, and with their compassion and willingness to go the extra mile for them. For example, physicians would often directly handle patient prescriptions, spending the time to talk to pharmacists whenever there was a problem so that the patients didn’t have to. Whenever there was a patient ailment that couldn’t be handled at the free clinic, the physicians would refer the patient to a vast network of volunteer specialists that would handle their cases at no charge. I was incredibly impressed with this network, and it was heartening to know that there were so many doctors who, even with their busy schedules, were willing to use their expertise to help people who had nowhere else to turn.
Last winter study, I spent time at the Washington Hospital in Fremont, Calif., shadowing an internist. It was an enlightening experience, and I’m incredibly glad to have been able to see what a hospitalist does. During my time shadowing doctors at the free clinic, I was surprised how different the life of a primary care physician is to that of a hospitalist. Overall, being able to observe in those two different settings in such a short time span gave me a much broader view of medicine, and showed me that being a doctor is not one singular experience, but can differ greatly based on the career paths chosen.
Another important aspect of my summer at the free clinic was a research project that I proposed and worked on in my free time. In summary, the project aimed to increase accessibility to the free clinic by analyzing where patients live and how long it would take them to travel to the free clinic. I used the Google Maps API, a free online tool that Google releases for developers, to calculate public transit travel time for each of the 2,000 patients who visited the free clinic in 2017, and found that due to the less-than-perfect San Francisco bus system, it was taking much longer than it should for patients to travel to the clinic. My presentation was well-received by the encouraging staff of physicians, and the clinic plans on using this data to apply for a Lyft grant that would give free or reduced-cost transportation for low-income patients.
As a lifelong resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, it was an incredibly rewarding experience to be working for the community. The free clinic provides an important service to the area, and despite the expansion of MediCare, there are thousands of bay area residents, including undocumented immigrants, recent immigrants, and people between jobs, who remain uninsured. The efforts of the free clinic ensure that there is a safety net for these residents, so that they can have access to basic primary care.
I’d like to extend my huge thanks to Drs. Patricia and Richard Gibbs, as my incredible experience this summer would not be possible without their generosity. Their dedication to and compassion for their patients is rare and admirable, and they represent the epitome of what it means to be a great doctor: caring for patients, regardless of who they are or where they come from. They inspire me to pursue a career in medicine, and I hope one day I can carry out my job with the same passion they have had for their entire careers.