Penn Medicine and student group take over free West Philly community health clinic

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Penn Medicine and a student group have taken over operations at the SHAMS health clinic in West Philadelphia that had briefly closed in February. The free clinic had recently become a model for collaborations between academic health systems and community organizers.

Aravind Krishnan, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania and co-president of the student group Shelter Health Outreach Program (SHOP), said his group and Penn Medicine have taken over operations at the clinic. He said the primary care clinic remains open on Monday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., and that the neurology clinic is open every third Wednesday of the month from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. Krishnan said services paused for a few weeks before resuming.

In 2018, The Islamic Circle of North America, a national Muslim nonprofit, opened a free clinic in Northeast Philadelphia to provide care for the city’s growing refugee and immigrant population . It was called the SHAMS clinic, which stands for “Social Health and Medical Services,” and is also the Arabic word for “sun.”

At first, the clinic was open every two weeks, and later expanded to running twice a week to see six to eight patients each week. It also moved to a location in West Philadelphia to accommodate a growing patient population and more recent refugees and immigrants settling in that part of the city.

The Islamic Circle of North America confirmed that the clinic closed earlier this year, and declined to comment any further.

For years, Noor Shaik has volunteered there, starting when she was a medical student at Thomas Jefferson University. She said the clinic served mostly people who go back and forth between the United States and their home countries, in North Africa and South Asia.

“Most people had already been in the States for several years, and were … people who go back and forth often between their home country and the United States, and that would lead to some fractured health care, so here they wanted a little bit more continuity,” Shaik said.

She said many patients are people who have lost access to medical care because they lost their insurance, and still have chronic conditions like migraines or Parkinson’s disease.

Shaik is now a third-year neurology resident at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Penn Medicine’s neurology program partnered with the clinic to provide specialty care, which she said filled an important gap.

She recently co-authored an article in the journal Neurology about their experience with the clinic and the partnership with Penn Medicine.

The article tells the story of a patient in his early 20s with epilepsy who recently moved from West Africa to the U.S. He had medication to control his seizures in his home country, but ran out of it after moving to the U.S., and started having seizures again. He went to the clinic where one of the residents saw him having multiple seizures and transferred him to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Shaik said that while this was a dramatic example, this patient is typical in that he had an existing neurological problem, but wasn’t getting treated for it in the U.S. until he came to this clinic.

“Many of these patients are either those who either lost insurance and haven’t been able to seek out medical care, and have been living with these chronic and quite debilitating conditions for years, or people who had seen medical care a long time ago, but were either turned off or didn’t have enough options,” she said.

Yombe Fonkeu, another third-year neurology resident, also volunteered at the SHAMS clinic.

“If I’m to stay in Philadelphia, being part of a community health clinic will always be a part of my practice, regardless of if I’m in academia or if I’m in private practice,” he said. “We know that access to care in the United States is very difficult. We know that it’s tough. It’s very, very difficult, even if you are someone who was born, raised here, educated here, everything. So for someone who isn’t any of those things, it’s doubly tough, triply tough.”

Shaik said that she’ll continue to see her neurology patients every other month through a partnership with Penn Medicine.

Neurologist Michael Rubenstein is in charge of global health and community outreach for Penn Medicine’s neurology department. He said volunteering at the clinic benefited residents because they had to learn how to take care of patients without relying on scans and medical tests that they have easy access to at the hospital.

“You come into the emergency room at Penn and the first thing people think about are like, ‘What can I scan?’ Whereas when we see patients at these other facilities, you know, really the question is ‘What is going on?’ And it’s about you talking to the patient, getting the history,” Rubenstein said.

He said the work is comparable to a program he runs twice a year, where he takes residents to Tanzania to provide specialty care. The neurology department also partners with Community Volunteers in Medicine, a free health care center in West Chester; and Puentes de Salud, a nonprofit in Philadelphia that serves the Latino community.

He added that many medical students are interested in Penn Medicine’s neurology department because of community health programs like this clinic.

“It is a huge recruitment tool for us,” he said. “This is a major part of why they come here is to be able to participate in these community efforts and then also in our global health effort; that is something that all the residents want to participate in. And I think you’ll see over time that these kinds of partnerships with community organizations are going to increase.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated that the SHAMS clinic was permanently closed. It has been corrected to reflect that the free health clinic reopened under new leadership.