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From the Front Row: The UI Free Mobile Clinic helps reach underserved populations

Published on September 1, 2022

This week, Logan talks with Morgan Kennedy from the University of Iowa Free Mobile Clinic. It’s a great conversation about the community value of the mobile clinic and providing care and access to underserved populations, and is a nice complimentary episode to last week’s episode about the Iowa City Free Medical and Dental Clinic.

Learn more about the Mobile Clinic at iowamobileclinic.org/

Find our previous episodes on SpotifyApple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

Logan Schmidt:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to From the Front Row, brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. My name is Logan Schmidt, and if this is your first time with us welcome. We’re a student run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone both in and outside of the field of public health.

Logan Schmidt:

Today, we are talking with Morgan Kennedy. She received her undergraduate degree in physiology from the University of Iowa, and is now a fourth-year medical student at Iowa’s own Carver College of Medicine. Currently, she is also the clinic operations executive of the University of Iowa Mobile Clinic, which provides free health screening, prevention, education, and basic health services to underserved populations. Today, she is here to talk with us about the clinic and its role in the community. Welcome to the show, Morgan.

Morgan Kennedy:

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be with y’all.

Logan Schmidt:

Yeah. So first off, can you tell us a little bit about your story? What was your journey to medical school like, and then becoming the mobile clinic’s clinic operations executive?

Morgan Kennedy:

Yeah, of course. My journey to medical school has been a little bit long-winded. I realized that this is what I wanted to do with my life somewhere midway through my undergraduate degree. I always knew that I was really interested in science and human physiology and wanted to do something within that realm.

Morgan Kennedy:

When I came to the University of Iowa, I got really involved with an organization called Dance Marathon, that some of you all might be familiar with that focused on providing emotional and financial support to pediatric cancer patients at our children’s hospital here. And that really drove my passion for helping others in a medical aspect.

Morgan Kennedy:

I was really passionate about being able to be there for them in this nonprofit, financial and emotional way, but realized after being in the hospital so much and being around these patients that, that was the environment I wanted to be in and what I wanted to do with my life.

Morgan Kennedy:

So that’s what drove me to pursue my medical career. It took me a while to get to that point. So I had some time off between undergraduate and coming back to Carver College of Medicine. Then I got to work in research full time. I worked as a nursing assistant, got a lot of different patient care experiences before I started medical school here.

Morgan Kennedy:

And I came into medical school to be a pediatrician given my past experiences and history working with kids. I really loved the advocacy that went along with working with children that potentially couldn’t advocate for themselves. And throughout my time at Carver, my passions have changed a little bit.

Morgan Kennedy:

I am now pursuing a career in obstetrics and gynecology where I’m able to combine my passions in women’s healthcare and the advocacy that comes along with that with this really unique patient population and getting to be a part of their lives. So it’s been a little bit of a winding road to get to that point, but as I am about to be applying to residency programs, I am really excited that I’ve found my way here.

Morgan Kennedy:

I guess, similarly, I came to Carver and having this background of having the opportunity to be involved in these really impactful and meaningful volunteer experiences, I knew pretty early from the start of medical school that I wanted to find something like that during my four years.

Morgan Kennedy:

It’s a lot of book work and really long hours and hard work, and it felt really important to me to do something to connect me back to the community and to why I started this whole process in the first place. And so I think I’m really lucky that I went to a medical school like Carver that has this University of Iowa Mobile Clinic.

Morgan Kennedy:

It is pretty much completely student run, and it is very pervasive in the Carver College of Medicine community. I think over 50% of medical students are involved in the mobile clinic at some point in their medical school career.

Morgan Kennedy:

So I got involved in my first year, in my first semester, volunteering at the clinic and really fell in love with it and could see what amazing work they were doing in the community. And then just continued to get more and more involved first as a clinic site coordinator for a couple of different clinics in the community.

Morgan Kennedy:

I worked at one of the clinics that was a clinic that primarily served patients that were reentering into the community after periods of time in the prison system, which was a really unique experience and made me fall in love with the patient populations we serve. And with being a coordinator, I then coordinated for one of our food pantry clinics and then helped to start one of our newer clinics that serves immigrant and refugee populations.

Morgan Kennedy:

And so it’s just been this gradual increasing involvement and growing love for the organization that led me to now be the clinic operations executive and get to oversee all of our clinic sites and help with some of the bigger picture projects.

Logan Schmidt:

Okay. Well, what a journey that you’ve been on. You spoke upon some shifts that you’ve gone through in terms of going from pediatrician to OB-GYN and who knows what you end up going through or to once you’re in your residency and thereafter.

Morgan Kennedy:

Yep.

Logan Schmidt:

You’re incredibly involved in what University of Iowa has to offer, and that’s just awesome to see that someone is finding their personal journey through what Iowa has, and it’s definitely making an impact on the community.

Logan Schmidt:

So speaking on population health and just serving vulnerable populations, can you tell us about the history of the clinic and what healthcare gaps does it fill? You definitely spoke on some of those, but can you reiterate those and add to it?

Morgan Kennedy:

Yeah, absolutely. So this is actually the clinic’s 20th year. We’re celebrating our 20 year anniversary of mobile clinic. So it’s been around for quite some time, which I think is really awesome.

Morgan Kennedy:

The clinic’s goal has always been to provide care to individuals in the community that are underserved, uninsured or underinsured, and try to help fill those gaps for those patients, but started as more of a basic health screening opportunity for people who might not have a primary care physician to be able to have some kind of contact with healthcare and the healthcare system, and be able to follow up on screening interventions and basic healthcare needs.

Morgan Kennedy:

And that goal and mission has largely continued. I would say what we do best is providing this safety net of primary care to the community. We are able to do pretty basic screening things such as screening for high blood pressure. We’re able to check hemoglobin HbA1c to screen for diabetes, as well as some cholesterol labs. Patients are able to see providers and talk with them and be able to manage their chronic conditions. And so I think that basic kind of primary care need is what we are best at.

Morgan Kennedy:

Over the years, mobile clinic has expanded quite a bit to fit the needs of the community and the patients that we serve. So we have added new clinics, gotten rid of clinics, depending on what’s needed at the time in the community.

Morgan Kennedy:

We’ve realized that our patient populations have shifted over the years and we often have people who are new residents in Iowa and in the United States and we are their first contact with the healthcare system.

Morgan Kennedy:

We have patients that are undocumented and don’t feel comfortable giving their information to the healthcare system. So we’ve really had to change some of our ways we communicate with patients and services based on those needs.

Morgan Kennedy:

We’ve also realized that over the years, while we provide this safety net and basic screening, that when you provide screening interventions, you have patients that screen positive for things, and then you need to be able to have a next step of how you’re going to help people obtain the care that they need.

Morgan Kennedy:

And so I think that’s why over the past five years or so, the mobile clinic executive teams and volunteers have been really trying to work towards is to provide better contacts and networks to provide specialized or more followup care based on what we are able to provide on a preventative health and screening aspect.

Logan Schmidt:

That’s a perfect lead into the next question, just because I want to ask, how does the clinic operate and how is it connected with the university healthcare system?

Morgan Kennedy:

So the mobile clinic is under the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics umbrella. So we are staffed by UIHC physicians, pharmacists, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants. And then our volunteer base is largely University of Iowa undergraduate and graduate program students.

Morgan Kennedy:

I think one of the coolest parts of the mobile clinic is how interprofessional it is. We have services from the pharmacy students, from public health students, from social work, from undergraduate volunteers, medical and PA students, physical therapy, dental, even child life students. So that’s one of the coolest parts and has been the most fun to get to work with all of these different groups and organizations to provide care.

Morgan Kennedy:

It is pretty much a hundred percent volunteer based and student run. We currently have 12 different clinic locations. And when we call ourselves a mobile clinic, we are not on wheels, driving around to places. We pack up all of our equipment and we drive that equipment and operate out of community centers or churches or schools, whatever is available and easily accessible to that specific community and the people that live there.

Morgan Kennedy:

We work really closely with community contacts in each of these areas to best fit the needs of the population that they work with. We currently are operating at 12 physical sites, these range from homeless shelters to food pantries, to churches, to a senior center, and then different community centers that serve mostly immigrant refugee populations. So we have very different patient populations at each of these sites.

Morgan Kennedy:

And then we also operate a tele-mobile clinic that was born out of the COVID era and has continued, and we’re hoping to continue to expand, to be able to see even more islands that maybe live in rural places outside of Johnson County, that can’t make it to our clinics.

Logan Schmidt:

Could you speak a little bit about what are the funding sources for the clinic? I understand that it’s many volunteer hours with the medical students or public health students, or what have you, but where are these supplies coming from? Who’s advocating for the mobile clinic to get these supplies?

Morgan Kennedy:

It’s really dedicated students on our board and volunteers who advocate for funding and supplies. Most of our funding comes from fundraising events. So the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine puts on a 5K run-walk every year. And part of that goes to the mobile clinic and part of it goes to the free medical clinic. So that’s a large portion of our funding each year.

Morgan Kennedy:

We also do a GOLDrush campaign that’s a virtual fundraising peer-to-peer push. We do a silent auction that we receive some of our funding from. And then we do get some funding from our wonderful institution, from the University of Iowa, and most recently from the diversity, equity, and inclusion department, which has been really wonderful and allowed us to expand quite a bit.

Morgan Kennedy:

And then we have more recently started to get more into applying for grant funding and various other application processes to receive a little bit more funding. A lot of our students are really passionate about a specific project or area in mobile clinic and will help us to secure funding through different grants or things like that.

Morgan Kennedy:

For example, we are adding in a new eyecare program and purchased an autorefractor. Recently, we noticed that a lot of our patients came to us with eyecare needs and there really was no free or low cost option in the area for us to be able to refer them to. And so that was something that dedicated students helped to obtain funding and be able to purchase an autorefractor that we’re going to be implementing in clinics soon.

Logan Schmidt:

So going into a little bit more of how the clinic engages with the community, you talked about engaging with community leaders and how to get contact with diverse populations who maybe won’t even go into a regular clinic because they’re new to the country or they’re underinsured. How does that engagement happen with the community and how do you let community members know about the clinic as well? So a little bit of a marketing side too.

Morgan Kennedy:

So we have a marketing team on our board and they do an awesome job of helping us to advertise our clinic services to the community. But I think the most beneficial advertising we have is word of mouth from people in the community that have come to our clinics and know that they can trust us and receive the care that they need.

Morgan Kennedy:

We work really closely with community members that run these various organizations. Most of us are medical students or other graduate students, and so we’re not the ones out there in the community on a day to day basis, getting to know people.

Morgan Kennedy:

And so we really strongly rely on our contacts at the food pantries or other nonprofit organizations in the area to help guide us in what the patient populations need and communicating with them about the resources that we have and helping us to know where our services are needed or not. So we have an advocacy team that works to reach out to members of the community to ask just those questions and to get better insight into what we can provide for the community.

Morgan Kennedy:

I think something that we’ve really moved towards in the last few years is we’re not a one size fits all clinic. So our structure doesn’t work the same for every clinic and every population we’re at. Then we really work to cater what we provide and how we communicate and interact with the patient populations based on what each one needs.

Morgan Kennedy:

For instance, we have some patients that don’t feel comfortable giving us their home address. We have some patients that are really uncomfortable with vaccinations, and so we really work to adapt our registration forms to make them feel more comfortable or to provide extra education prior to coming in and just offering people vaccinations. So I think that’s been a really awesome improvement recently to adapt what we do to fit the needs of each specific site.

Logan Schmidt:

You talked about a lot of patients coming in needing eyecare, and you have a big accomplishment of buying a new device to help out with that. That was clearly one need that the clinic had. What other needs does the clinic have currently and maybe how can others help with those needs?

Morgan Kennedy:

I think we definitely have just financial and lack of supply needs. We have the awesome volunteers and community sites that are willing to operate clinics really frequently, but we right now can only operate one clinic at any given time. And so we have clinics pretty much every Saturday, Sunday, and then usually a night or two during the week as well in order to provide more care to the community more frequently.

Morgan Kennedy:

We would love to be able to have the supplies, to be able to operate two clinics simultaneously on the weekend days, for instance. And that would require us to have increased lab equipment and things like that. So funding and supplies is definitely a need of ours moving forward.

Morgan Kennedy:

We also always need providers to staff our clinic. These need to be UIHC providers given that we are under the University of Iowa umbrella, but we’re always looking to recruit providers, PAs, NPs to staff our clinics.

Morgan Kennedy:

And then as I mentioned before, a huge need is just these more specialty services. And we’ve grown some really great relationships this year with specialty departments at University of Iowa, such as neurology and dermatology that have come and done popup clinics. But our patients really do sometimes need more specialized care and followup that they cannot pay for.

Morgan Kennedy:

So that is one of our biggest needs that we’re trying to look into various avenues to help out with that. If we’re going to identify something for them, we would love to be able to help them through the process of actually taking care of that medical problem or need.

Morgan Kennedy:

We would love to be able to provide increased screening efforts, such as mammograms for patients or colonoscopies that is recommended for everyone in the community. And right now we’re not able to provide those specialized pieces of screening care.

Morgan Kennedy:

I mean, I could go on and on. There are a lot of barriers to the healthcare system and to these patients accessing care and we’re providing what we can and continuing to expand as much as possible.

Logan Schmidt:

If someone’s listening to this right now and wants to reach out, what would be the best way to reach out?

Morgan Kennedy:

That’s a great question, Logan. So I would first recommend checking out our website and that is iowamobileclinic.org. From there, you can click on the contact us button and that has our phone number as well as our email. Since most of us are students, the easiest option is probably to contact us via email. If you’re interested in volunteering or getting more involved, we always love to create new community relationships and connections, and always love to train new volunteers.

Morgan Kennedy:

The website also has an opportunity if people are just interested in donating. If you go to the contact us button, there is a donate button, if people are willing to help mobile clinic in its efforts moving forward.

Logan Schmidt:

So switching it back from the mobile clinic to you a little bit more here, what have you learned from being in this position of an operations executive? And you spoke about some other positions you had too, but what has this position helped you learn that maybe other medical students don’t have the opportunity to learn if they didn’t pursue more of a management or administrative role?

Morgan Kennedy:

I have a lot of things that I think about when I think about what it’s taught me or what I’ve learned. I think it’s really helped for me to see such a wide range of patient populations and presentations and needs. And what you or I may think of as healthcare needs or priorities is very different from other people.

Morgan Kennedy:

And so I think it’s really helped me to look at patient autonomy in a different light and really take each patient at face level and address them as an individual and help them to access and receive what they need out of that visit rather than what I think they need. And I think that, that has translated really strongly into my patient care that I’m able to be involved in through my medical school training as well.

Morgan Kennedy:

I think one of the biggest things that I’ve noticed that mobile clinic is so helpful for is that you just inevitably become really comfortable and knowledgeable about other community resources. So obviously mobile clinic is a huge resource, but various patient needs come up during the clinic and part of our job is to help connect those patients with other resources in the community, whether it’s food pantries, et cetera.

Morgan Kennedy:

And so I think that, that gives me a different background when I’m approaching patients in medical school at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics and I feel like I’m really aware of the various resource options in the community. And that’s something that’s so helpful, because it’s not something that always gets taught in medical school. You have so much to learn and to cover.

Morgan Kennedy:

And I think knowing the options and resources in your community takes a long time to figure out, but is so important to being able to provide comprehensive healthcare to the patients that you’re seeing. And I think mobile clinic helps our students have a better idea of what the Iowa City community has to offer for its residents.

Logan Schmidt:

In terms of population health and managing patients or patient populations, your experience with the mobile clinic seems perfect for engaging those communities or other organizations within the community. And it seems that your experience is the ideal experience for upcoming physicians to treat patients with complex needs.

Logan Schmidt:

And when we’re looking at health disparities that are coming in from not necessarily the condition that they have, but where they’re living and what their food supply is like, and et cetera, et cetera, all these other things that come into play. And it seems that the mobile clinic in your experience and this role has shined light into more possibilities of a physician connecting their patient to other resources, to help them that ultimately helps with their health too.

Morgan Kennedy:

Absolutely.

Logan Schmidt:

So now you’re in your final year of medical school, meaning that you’re leaving your role. Where would you like the mobile clinic to go in the future, and especially after you leave your position? And then after that, where do you plan on going? You talked about OB-GYN, getting a residency there, but what else?

Morgan Kennedy:

Yeah, absolutely. I think part of the beauty of mobile clinic is that a different student leadership group comes in almost every year. Usually mobile clinic gets people in and traps them because it’s such a great organization. So you have quite a few people that are involved for many years, but our board has quite a bit of turnover each year.

Morgan Kennedy:

And I think that’s a wonderful thing because people come in with new ideas and new perspectives and new passions. I’m obviously really passionate and interested in women’s health and increasing those services, then the next year you might have a different passion. And so I’m just excited to see where those passions take the clinic.

Morgan Kennedy:

I think we’re working really hard this year to revamp some things and lay some really good groundwork that people can then take and run with moving forward. But I think all of us on the board and probably the volunteers would love to see increased specialty services for patients that need future followup care.

Morgan Kennedy:

I know you guys have talked with the free medical clinic as well, which I don’t think we could do what we do without having a relationship and partnership with the free medical clinic honestly. We refer so many of our patients to them. They’re able to do more comprehensive laboratory workups and chronic disease management than we are and are just such a wonderful resource in the community.

Morgan Kennedy:

And I think they would agree too, that if we could move more towards having avenues for our patients that need increased care to receive that at a affordable, reasonable price that, that would be a huge win for the community.

Logan Schmidt:

And how about yourself? Where do you-

Morgan Kennedy:

Oh yeah. So I am really excited to be applying to OB-GYN and to hopefully be a future OB-GYN. It’s a competitive application process, and so I am just hoping to match anywhere, but I don’t know where it’s going to take me. I am just hoping that in this search for a program, I’m able to find somewhere that has opportunities like this to be involved at a community level like this, and to be able to help underserved and minority patients.

Morgan Kennedy:

We run a women’s health clinic in conjunction with the free medical clinic. They allow us to use their space once a semester and we have students and staff that come from the OB-GYN department at University of Iowa and help to run that. And so I’m hoping that I’m able to find a program that really values preventative health and serving the underserved like University of Iowa does.

Logan Schmidt:

Are you interested in rural healthcare in general?

Morgan Kennedy:

I am. I have these two very strong interests that sometimes don’t go together, but I’m really interested in teaching and working in an academic center, but I also really love the rural health population and minority patient populations and underserved and giving back to my community. So those things don’t always go together, but I’m really hoping that I can find a future career that allows me to be able to do both.

Logan Schmidt:

With everything that you talked about today, it seems that your future is going to involve more than just being a physician and being a community leader as well.

Morgan Kennedy:

Yes, I am hoping so.

Logan Schmidt:

So last question, we always ask our guests this. And I think you touched on some things that you’ve learned already, but this is a unique question in terms of something you were maybe confident about knowing or you thought you knew and then later you were proven wrong.

Morgan Kennedy:

What a good question. It’s hard to not think about this in terms of healthcare. I think I thought that I knew, or I thought that I could provide the healthcare to patients to give them whatever they needed. And I felt like in my naive, younger self coming into medicine, I thought if you just care about your patients and you just work really hard to get them the resources that you need, then it’ll be fine. And that is not unfortunately how our healthcare system is set up.

Morgan Kennedy:

There are so many barriers and I think it’s a little overwhelming for people like me involved in mobile clinic who really want this for our patients. And some of the issues seem too big for any of us to fix or to do anything about. And so I think that, that has been definitely an eye-opening experience during medical school.

Morgan Kennedy:

I think I’ve learned that I can’t fix everything and you can only do as much as you can do. And I think that every interaction with every singular patient matters and helps to move in the right direction. But I have learned that just having good intentions and caring about a patient is not enough often to get them what they need, unfortunately.

Logan Schmidt:

That is an unfortunate truth and I think with my pursuit of healthcare administration, I hope to have a small change in those things that you’re talking about in terms of access and affordability and et cetera. There is hope, and I think our generation will lead to good things in the future with people like you, who will really care about the community and making sure that patients have what they need.

Logan Schmidt:

And I know one thing is collaboration between clinicians, between administrators, between community organizations, this collaboration effort is what’s going to help vulnerable populations in the future. So yeah, that’s fantastic.

Morgan Kennedy:

Absolutely. It’s definitely very uplifting meeting people like you and working with my peers and seeing how much everyone cares. And I am really hopeful that things are going to change for the better in our lifetime of practicing in our roles and our jobs.

Logan Schmidt:

On that note, we should end this podcast. And I really appreciate you coming on and sharing about your journey into being a clinician and the mobile clinic and the community relations that go along with that and talking about the current state of the medical system right now, too. So thank you so much.

Morgan Kennedy:

Yeah. I just wanted to give a shout out to the rest of my mobile clinic team. Although they could not be here to be on the podcast with me, the mobile clinic would not run without them. We have a wonderful executive team that takes care of so much of what I talked about today.

Morgan Kennedy:

And then I am no longer the one that is at all of these clinics on the ground, doing things and have such wonderful clinic coordinators and volunteers that make these clinics happen and give patients such good experiences. So it just is such a collaborative team effort and want to make sure that the rest of my wonderful team gets credit for the amazing work of mobile clinic as well.

Logan Schmidt:

That’s great. Thank you, Morgan.

Morgan Kennedy:

Thank you, Logan.

Anya Morozov:

That’s it for our episode this week. Big thanks to Morgan Kennedy with the University of Iowa Mobile Clinic for joining us today.

Anya Morozov:

This episode was hosted and written by Logan Schmidt and edited and produced by me, Anya Morozov. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. And our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

Anya Morozov:

If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health.

Anya Morozov:

Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.