Attractions Coming Your Way

There are many attractions to working at Virginia Community Healthcare (CHC) Sites:

TIME:
Often, you have an opportunity to spend much more valuable time with a patient than you would in traditional private practice sites. Broadly speaking at a CHC you may have 15 to 30 minutes for patient office visits—on average in private practice you may only have 6-7 minutes. This increase of time in our proactive medical care model can make a huge difference.

PATIENT EDUCATION AND ADVOCACY:
Granted, in our practice settings there are in many cases much, much more things you have to do in a single visit, as that may be the only encounter you have with the patient who may not come back to see you for several months to years after initial office visit. You can spend more time in educating the patient of disease processes and actually explaining the pharmacology and pathophysiology of what is going on with the acute or chronic health condition. It really provides an opportunity to make a major impact on the life of the patient that you may not have otherwise.

SUPPORTIVE TRAINING ENVIRONMENT:
Oftentimes you will work with providers who were once in the same shoes you may find yourself in as a novice and appreciate and understand what it means to be new to the profession. As a new provider there is much to learn and CHC sites tend to foster a supportive and encouraging environment for doing so.
To better accommodate new practitioners, CHC’S have a supportive “slower pace for learning”—this is VERY important for a new graduate as they begin to grasp putting together textbook with reality. In many cases, you are seeing things for the first time and actually able to tie all the links together to get a broad, bigger picture of what you have learned in school.

LOAN REPAYMENT OPTIONS:
In being the novice provider and creating your foundation, at a Community Health Center there is the added benefit of the HRSA student loan repayment program. This is a special federally funded program that actually helps to fund repayment for professional student loans for a timed commitment to work in certain “HRSA” approved sites. You have the option of doing so half time or full time, based on your personal choice and needs. If you select full time, you could possibly earn up to 60K towards your student loan debt--in addition to your annual salary. I was very fortunate in that my educational institution actually encouraged this for us and my nursing class was very well informed of this incentive that exists.

Posted for Author Narita Snead