Stritch Schweitzer Fellows work with communities to advance health equity
By Naomi Gitlin
How do you develop community-based programs to create a pipeline for high school students under-represented in medicine to pursue healthcare careers or engage minority youth in health justice-oriented agriculture?
Just ask two Stritch School of Medicine physicians-in-training.
Travis Nielsen and Sharmain Siddiqui were named 2022-2023 Schweitzer Fellows, a national program that helps develop the next generation of professionals who will work with and empower people who are vulnerable, to live healthier lives and create heathier communities.
Travis Nielsen
The Schweitzer Fellowship’s focus on addressing the health needs facing under-served Chicago communities aligned perfectly with the volunteer work of Travis Nielsen (class of 2023).
Nielsen designed a program to empower bilingual (Spanish/English) high school students from underprivileged backgrounds learn about public health. And importantly, use that knowledge to make a difference in their home community of Cicero, by improving access to preventive health services for Spanish-speaking immigrants living there.
“Latinos are significantly under-represented in medicine,” said Nielsen.
And he knows, first-hand, that there are gaps on the path to a career in medicine, starting as early as high school. Nielsen was one of those students who wanted to pursue medicine but “fell through the cracks” in high school because of a lack of guidance. That’s why he has worked with high school students from Maywood and Cicero since he enrolled in the Stritch MD/MPH dual degree program in 2018.
When asked why he chose Loyola University Chicago, Nielsen said, “There was a camaraderie at Stritch – a sense of students helping students and really wanting to be around each other. I only felt that at Stritch and not at any other schools,” he said.
During his family medicine clerkship, Nielsen developed his Schweitzer project, which also met the needs of Cicero Medical Clinica San Lazaro, a private clinic, just west of Chicago. Short-staffed and low on resources, the clinic needed volunteers to contact patients to remind them about health screenings and other appointments. While this is the fourth year that high school student participants have attended monthly public health training sessions, Nielsen’s project includes the addition of this hands-on clinical experience. Both activities provide students with an opportunity to learn while “giving back” to their community.
Nielsen seeks a career in internal medicine and infectious diseases, along with continuing his translational science research. His Stritch Research Honors project involved developing and implementing an anti-microbial stewardship program in the outpatient setting. He and his mentor, Fritzie Albarillo, MD, published a paper together earlier this year, “Introducing antimicrobial stewardship to the outpatient clinics of a suburban academic health system,” in Antimicrobial Stewardship & Healthcare Epidemiology.
Sharmain Siddiqui
Schweitzer Fellow Sharmain Siddiqui (class of 2024), always has been drawn to medicine. “It is one of the best foundations to practice social justice,” she said.
After completing pre-med coursework and grounding herself in the Humanities at Northwestern, Siddiqui earned her Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies there and began looking at medical schools. Loyola’s and Stritch’s focus on justice and mission really called her. In the wake of the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s murder, Siddiqui observed street medic trainings in action which invigorated her. “I saw a few med. students from Rush and UChicago, but throughout the month, the trainings were dominated by Stritch students,” she said. Clearly, that level of participation, a focus on justice, and working with people who live on the margins, resonated with Siddiqui.
Her interest in farming feels ancestral; members of her family were date and sugar cane farmers in Karachi, Pakistan. Combined with the growing food sovereignty movement in Chicago and the intersection of environmental racism and health, Siddiqui created a youth farming apprenticeship program in Little Village. There, in this Latino neighborhood on Chicago’s near southwest side, she hopes to foster sustained engagement among minority youth around health justice-oriented agriculture. Food sovereignty requires building a sustainable relationship with the land; working with a community other than her own is important to Siddiqui, too. Her Schweitzer program engages a community and its infrastructure to provide community gardening for 50 families. Collective ownership and community control of the Little Village site offers these families a form of sovereignty over the land. Working with this “farming” community, Siddiqui hopes to build an herbal, mutual aid apothecary, along with an action-oriented curriculum, to share and create knowledge within and beyond the Little Village community.
By the fall of 2022, younger community participants had developed a sense of ownership over the land. For some older participants, who may not have had a good experience (or relationship with) medicine or physicians, that sense of ownership is not palpable -- yet.
Coincidentally, the Schweitzer Fellowship allows Siddiqui to hone in on the specialty she will pursue. While a variety are of interest, primary care is near the top of her list because, she says, “it is the most people-centered medicine and it opens up avenues to think through the impact of social determinants of health.”
For each of these three Stritch physicians-in-training, balancing the time commitment (Fellows contribute a minimum of 200 hours of service during their Fellowship year along with other responsibilities), with medical school or a full time job is no easy task.
But like many Stritch student endeavors, it’s not unusual for these physicians-in-training to help solve some of the toughest problems as they strive to reduce health inequities.
Learn more about the Schweitzer Fellowship! Sign up here for an informational session. The deadline for applications is February 1, 2023.