Mobile clinic teams finding ways to best assist during pandemic
With New York City hospitals already becoming overwhelmed and the expectation that health centers nationwide will soon follow suit, what place do mobile health clinics have in the battle against COVID-19? On Tuesday, the folks from Harvard Medical School’s Family Van co-hosted a webinar to take the industry’s pulse, discuss best practices, and bounce around some good ideas. The idea for the webinar came during a brainstorming session between Family Van founder and executive director Nancy Oriol, a Harvard Medical School (HMS) lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine, and HMS first-year Ahmed Ahmed, who is interested in writing an academic paper about the mobile phenomenon and its relation to the bigger picture. “These vans tap into a community that isn’t well covered in terms of insurance and that struggles with health care literacy and equitable health outcomes,” said Ahmed. “So the mobile teams are working to see how to best utilize...