University of Connecticut students created a medical clinic club and are partnering with registered non-profit Remote Area Medical to put on a pop-up clinic in March 2024 at Windham Middle School to provide free medical, dental and vision care.
Brooke DiVasto, a sixth-semester physiology and neurobiology major, decided to create the club at UConn in order to get volunteers that would help at the clinic, which would provide care to approximately 300 people in the community.
DiVasto said volunteers will help out by managing the parking lot, greeting patients at check in, calling patients back after the clinic to assist them with follow-up care appointments as needed, and overall by fulfilling general support roles.
“We created the club because one of the components of the clinic is we need over 100 general support each day,” DiVasto said. “So we were like the best way for us to advertise this was to also have the club so that we could recruit undergrads for it and also be more of a collaboration between the club and community outreach.”
DiVasto said they have had a lot of UConn students sign up for these roles, adding that they are only really looking for parking lot volunteers now. Active members of the club will receive transportation to and from the clinic, a t-shirt and three meals a day. DiVasto said students are able to request documentation of service hours after the event if needed.
The clinic will be held on March 2 and March 3 at Windham Middle School with a set-up day on March 1. The clinic is open to anyone in the community. DiVasto said UConn students are also welcome to come and receive the free care as well.
DiVasto said the whole process began last March when she first got in contact with RAM, and she has been working with her other three committee members since then. DiVasto said after speaking with RAM, she went with her other committee members to a clinic last April to see if it was something they would want to do.
“We drove up to Pennsylvania, we left UConn at two in the morning and saw a clinic firsthand,” DiVasto said. “We were like, yeah, this is something that we definitely want to do.”
During the fall semester, DiVasto said they began recruitment for general support and all the medical providers.
“We are very lucky UConn Dental, the School of Dental Medicine is coming in,” DiVasto said. “They are bringing in about 25 students each day.”
DiVasto said she is glad that she is able to put on the clinic to help her community, adding that it was something she wanted to do since high school. She said she couldn’t have gone through the process of creating the club and organizing the clinic without collaborating with the other three committee members: Caelyn Hoffman, Sarah Courtney and Stephan Desir.
When asked if it is something that she would like to repeat in the future, she said they are going to wait to see how the community responds to the first clinic.
“It is something that we will have in the back of our minds between March 1, 2 and 3 to see how many people actually attend,” DiVasto said. “We will gauge it from there because it is definitely something the four of us are all very passionate about and we just want to make sure the community actually at the end of the day truly does need it.”
More information can be found here and any questions can be directed to uconnmedicalclinicclub@gmail.com.