A New Experience, A New Beginning – Erina McGuire ’24

“At Rocking Horse Community Health Center we provide complete health and wellness services to take care of you, your family and everyone in our community. We offer medical, dental, behavioral health, patient advocacy and material assistance to help you be the best you can be.”

-Direct quote from the Rocking Horse Website

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  My final Co-op at Antioch is at Rocking Horse Community Health Center in Springfield Ohio. It is a self design Co-op that I decided to do for two reasons. The first reason is that it is close to my house so I can easily ride my little electric bicycle to and from the location. The other reason is that even though Rocking Horse is a hospital, I work in the Patient Advocacy department. I don’t plan on being a healthcare worker in the future, but working as a Patient Advocate can help me learn more about patient needs and resources that can help my clients when I one day become a therapist.

“Our patient advocates can assist you in breaking down the barriers that may be keeping you from living your best life. We can help with navigating resources for housing, employment, guardianship, applying for cash, food and medical assistance, applying for daycare, transportation, prescription assistance, utility assistance, homelessness, domestic violence and more. Please talk to your provider or call one of our advocates directly.”

-Direct quote from the Rocking Horse Patient Advocacy Page Patient Advocates do plenty of things around Rocking Horse. They work with every department and do their best to ensure that the patients here have what they need in order to have their needs met. As one of the Advocates, Ja-Lynn told me: Patients won’t get better until the issues in their lives start to improve and their needs are met. The two main parts of my job are working in the food pantry to put together food boxes and hand them out, and collecting Opportunity Assessments and calling patients to get them in contact with resources they may need. For the food pantry, when people come by for a food box, we put their name into PantryTrak and check to see if they’re a patient here or not. If they are, we put in their chart on NextGen that they received a food box, if not we mark it on a sheet to keep track of how many non-patients we assist. I also put together food boxes and help to bring in the food delieveries for said boxes roughly once a week. For Opportunity Assessments, every morning I pick them up from one of the nurse stations. Opportunity assessments are meant to be given to patients during each visit, and they ask if there are any areas in their lives that they may need assistance with, like food, housing, healthcare and other similar areas. There are four nurse stations in our facility that have the Opportunity Assessment drop boxes. One in Pediatrics, two in Family Practice, and one in Obstetrics. When I return to my workspace, I organize the assessments into three piles. Negative Assessments, English Positive Assessments and Non-English Positive Assessments. A negative assessment is where a patient marks ‘no’ for each question asked about assistance, while a positive assessment is one where the patient marks at least one yes. Both negative and positive assessments are put in patient charts on NextGen, but with positive assessments we reach out to the patient and share with them different resources depending on their needs. However if a patient marks that they do not want an Advocate reaching out to them, we still treat it as a positive assessment but we complete it and note in the chart that they did not want to be contacted. As for the Non-English Positive Assessments, Rocking Horse Community Health Center serves many Spanish and Haitian-Creole speaking people. The questions aren’t any different, which is why the Non-English Negative Assessments can be done since we do not reach out to the patient, but the positive assessments are put into the patient’s chart and then a task is sent to all Advocates for someone to take. We have a few advocates who can speak Haitian-Creole as well as some Advocates and student volunteers who can speak Spanish, but we also have a translation service that can be called to help the Advocates who cannot speak any of those languages. Although I can really only speak English, I did take French at Antioch. While Haitian-Creole is its own language, it uses French as its base. So even though I can’t hold a conversation with someone who speaks Haitian-Creole,  I can at least speak enough that I can roughly ask someone what their name and birthday is so that I can look them up in the system to give them a food box or see if they have an appointment (Thank you professor Cary Campbell). Food boxes and Opportunity Assessments are not the only tasks that am able to do. I have done a few office tasks, and recently got the opportunity to go on a house call with one of our Advocates who did an initial assessment to assist one of the doctors for a telehealth visit. So far I have really enjoyed working with the Advocates and other volunteers. They are all amazing people who find a way to make me laugh everyday, even when things aren’t going the best. It’s been fun learning the work, though it can be hard with the personal situations of patients needing assistance. I think it is definitely helping to prepare me for the types of things I can see later in life as a therapist.