Other Features
Good Health Begins with Good Dental Care
Students Expand the Borders of Health - 1, 2, 3
Marci Contreras, a first-year student at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston's physician's assistant program, and Sharon Gerardo, a first-year medical student at UTMB, watch closely. Like other medical and health care students who volunteer to come on Frontera's weekend trips to the border, they want to be able to practice the skills they are now only reading about in their classes and to learn more.
“I feel more useful here,” Ms. Contreras says. “Even though you're just a student, you feel like you can do more here. Also, it's good for us to see the need down here.”
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A medical student introduces herself to a young patient |
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Kenny Kronforst continues to talk to the patient and his wife. She wants the man to get more exercise, she says, and watch his diet. Can he and his wife possibly attend the health fair Frontera de Salud is sponsoring the next day? That way, they can have access to more information and procedures.
As they leave the house, the Frontera team shakes hands with the couple and with their adult son, who is recovering from surgery.
“I feel privileged to do this kind of work,” Ms. Kronforst says. After her years in Peru and Mexico, providing health services to the Rio Grande Valley, “brings me back home,” she says. “I love helping this population. They deserve as much as anybody else.
“Look at that family we just saw,” she adds. “They've worked hard all their lives. And now, they're still trying to take care of each other.”
Afterwards, the other Frontera teams gather to exchange stories and practice their Spanish. The 15 or so students who are here for this weekend are from UT Medical Branch in Galveston, UT Health Science Center at Houston and UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, as well as two undergraduate pre-med majors from UT Pan American. Most have traveled hundreds of miles overnight by van to be here.
Kirk Smith, Frontera's executive director, has been here from the beginning. In 1998, he was a third-year UTMB medical student doing a clerkship at the Brownsville Community Health Center. He saw the enormous hardships of the Valley's “working poor” – those who were employed, but uninsured, who earned too much for Medicaid and were too young for Medicare. After government cutbacks, the public clinics they had relied on for health care dramatically decreased available services.
“Women couldn't even get pap smears,” he said. “There were no health-care providers here for them. It really opened my eyes about the whole issue of access to health care.”
Dr. Smith, who now holds both an M.D. and Ph.D in medical humanities, joined with other students to found Frontera in 1998. Since then, Frontera now includes two official chapters at UTMB and UTHSC San Antonio. Several times a year, always on the weekends, a group of students comes to Brownsville to provide services to the working poor. While most students have at least a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, their groups always include translators fluent in both English and Spanish.
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