The Gold Humanism Honor Society chapter of the David Geffen School of Medicine works on various projects that promote the mission to advocate for the compassionate care of the individual and family. These projects are aimed at promoting the mission of the GHHS in elevating the values of humanism and professionalism within the field of medicine and its constituent institutions.
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The GHHS DGSOM chapter hosted a Medicine Grand Rounds in conjunction with the Department of Medicine on March 8, 2017. Our featured speaker was Dr. Jyoti Puvvula, MD, MPH, and her talk was titled “Bending the Arc Toward Justice: Promoting Health Equity through Community Medicine and Social Justice.” The talk was held at 8:30am in the Tamkin Auditorium at the Ronald Reagan-UCLA Medical Center.
Preventing Third Year Burnout
The third year of medical school is an exciting and challenging time for medical students. At the UCLA GHHS we believe it is important for students to know their work is valuable and appreciated, and that they have avenues to discuss the challenges they face during clerkships. To this end the UCLA GHHS will be preparing and distributing care packages for current third year medical students. We hope to provide encouragement to our peers and give them a chance to speak with colleagues who have weathered similar experiences. This initiative was started by the inaugural Class of 2016 cohort, and will be continued this year given its success last year.
No One Dies Alone
No One Dies Alone (NODA) is a program started in Oregon in 2001in an effort to provide comfort and companionship for patients nearing the end of their lives. Volunteers are trained to provide compassionate, nonjudgmental support at the bedside. UCLA volunteers have started incorporating this program at UCLA-Santa Monica and Ronald Reagan Medical Center. GHHS members have attended these training sessions, and promote this program’s important mission through outreach to nurses and through recruitment of medical student volunteers. Our goal is to create long-term DGSOM involvement in this valuable work to improve end-of-life care.
Multimedia Resources at the VA
The goal of this VA project is to teach vets how better to use existing resources—keyboard-linked TV screens in their rooms through which they can access meditative music, mindfulness exercises, and information about their hospital stay—to enrich their experience in the hospital, relieve stress and improve mood. We are working to create a short manual introducing the vets to all the great resources at their fingertips, and plan to reach out to current inpatients to “train” them how to use the guides and TVs to their best advantage.
Health Equity Forum
The Health Equity Forum is an umbrella network to bring together student organizations at DGSOM and across the health professional schools to share ideas, collaborate on projects and events, work together to build our campus culture of equity, social justice, and anti-oppression, and enhance our impact for collective action and community engagement. The Forum will be organized into working groups focused on Education and Curriculum, UCLA Equity and Campus Culture, and Community Organizing and Advocacy. These are intended to streamline and facilitate the work we already do rather than recreate the wheel. GHHS is proud to be an official member of this new space and support the incredible work of other UCLA students.
Solidarity Day is an annual and national GHHS event that is traditionally held around Valentine’s Day. The second DGSOM GHHS Solidarity Day was held on February 14th, 2017. On Solidarity Day, GHHS members distributed Valentine’s Day cards of appreciation to nurses in all units in Ronald Reagan-UCLA Medical Center to demonstrate DGSOM’s ongoing appreciation of the important work performed by our nursing staff. Additionally, GHHS members reached out to hospitalized patients to ask about their lives and stories, and created individualized “Tell Me More” cards that were displayed near the patient’s bed. The aim of these cards was to help to engage the medical community in a discussion about humanism in medicine, and hopefully help the entire healthcare team to know their patients better.
