Challenges in Founding and Developing Medical School Student-Run Asylum Clinics
- PDF / 612,540 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 82 Downloads / 150 Views
BRIEF COMMUNICATION
Challenges in Founding and Developing Medical School Student‑Run Asylum Clinics Fangning Gu1 · Emily Chu1 · Andrew Milewski2 · Sophia Taleghani1 · Mehar Maju3 · Randall Kuhn3 · Adam Richards4 · Eleanor Emery5,6 Accepted: 3 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In response to the rapidly rising number of asylum applications, student-run asylum clinics (SRACs) designed to provide pro bono forensic medical evaluations have emerged at medical schools across the United States. Distinct from traditional student-run clinics in the services they provide and in their operational models, SRACs face a unique set of challenges. This study aims to identify the common challenges in building SRACs and to collect insights to inform a structured approach to collaborative problem-solving. This study gathered data from online surveys and semi-structured phone interviews with representative medical student SRAC leaders. 14 clinics participated in the 2017 online survey, 15 clinics in the 2018 online survey, and eight clinics in the 2018–2019 phone interviews. We identified common challenges in five areas: volunteer recruitment, clinic operations, case demand, institutional support, and leadership. SRACs stand to benefit from ongoing extramural collaborations to overcome shared challenges. Keywords Asylum seekers · Forensic medical evaluation · Human rights education · Student-run asylum clinics
Introduction
The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employers or the federal government. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-020-01106-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Every year, a growing number of individuals flee persecution in their home countries and seek asylum in the United States: The backlog of pending asylum cases grew from 6000 in 2009 to more than 320,000 by the end of 2018 [1]. Although individuals have the legal right to seek asylum in the U.S., asylum seekers bear the burden of proving past persecution or a well-founded fear of persecutions in their
* Fangning Gu [email protected]
Eleanor Emery [email protected]
Emily Chu [email protected]
1
Andrew Milewski [email protected]
David Geffen School of Medicine, 10833 Le Conte Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
2
Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA
3
Department of Community Health Sciences, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Los Angeles, CA, USA
4
Community Partners International, Research, San Francisco, CA, USA
5
Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge, MA, USA
6
Department of Internal Medicine, Northern Navajo Medical Center, Shiprock, NM, USA
Sophia Taleghani [email protected] Mehar Maju [email protected] Randall Kuhn [email protected] Adam Richards [email protected]
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
home countries [2]. Trained clinicians can perform f
Data Loading...
