Phillips Neighborhood Clinic receives excellence award

The Phillips Neighborhood Clinic (PNC) has been recognized in the category of Outstanding Graduate/Professional Student Group by the Tony Diggs Excellence Awards for work they performed during the 2012 calendar year.

This annual award recognizes the achievements of student groups across the University of Minnesota in honor of former director of the Student Activities Office Tony Diggs.

An awards banquet was held on April 11, 2013, and winners were published in the Minnesota Daily's commemorative publication Ski-U-Mah.

From Ski-U-Mah 2013:

Phillips Neighborhood Clinic is a student-run free clinic with a two-fold mission: 1) To provide accessible, culturally appropriate, interdisciplinary health care services and education in order to reduce the burdens of poor medical access and raise the quality of life for our patients and 2) To provide health professional students with the skills they need to effectively and compassionately serve people who are underinsured and/or unstably housed. With a strong emphasis on interprofessional education, the clinic provides a dynamic learning environment for students from seven different schools housed at the University of Minnesota: medical, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, public health, social work, and most recently dental.

The clinic sees over 1,000 patients annually and undertook several major projects in 2012-13 including new educational initiatives, expanded outreach into local communities, increased fundraising, development of a new website and the implementation of an electronic health record. The EHR is a crucial piece of technology, and implementation was a major undertaking for the clinic but will ultimately benefit both patients and students. Patients can expect care that is coordinated over time and students can expect to learn a lifelong skill important for health professional students. The planning and implementation was completed on top of the usual duties of the clinic and within the same time period that a clinic staffed by full-time professionals would have. This was an exceptional undertaking for a clinic run by students all working on their professional/graduate degrees.

Congratulations to our Medical School students and their interprofessional partners across the Academic Health Center for this achievement.