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| navigate: home: magazine: fall 2002: article | |
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Lion Care clinic initiative to benefit sight of homeless By Sean Young and Neel Desai | ||||||
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Lion Care, the medical clinic for the homeless managed by students from Penn State College of Medicine, has added comprehensive eye care to its services. The Penn State-Lion Care Ophthalmology Outreach Initiative is a partnership with Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center’s Department of Ophthalmology and its Residency Training Program. It represents a new effort in the ongoing mission to bring medical care to those who would not normally receive it.
The far-reaching goals of the project include eye examinations at local homeless shelters provided by resident and attending physicians. Individuals requiring further evaluation or treatment will be referred to the Ophthalmology Clinic at Penn State Hershey Medical Center. Beyond providing essential screening exams and treatments, the Ophthalmology Outreach Initiative will also work to identify significant eye problems that affect the indigent population.
“This is a tremendous opportunity to serve,” said Dr. David Quillen, interim chair of the Department of Ophthalmology and associate professor of ophthalmology. “This is an excellent example of how our medical students and residents from Penn State College of Medicine can and do positively contribute to our community.”
“The new initiative was formed to address concerns that even mild visual impairment can result in significant disability or limitations in otherwise routine activities—a burden carried disproportionately by the indigent population at great social and economic cost,” said Neel Desai, fourth-year medical student, a native of Columbia, Md., and a principal organizer of the new eye care initiative.
“There is growing knowledge that many of the most common causes of vision loss, though frequently unnoticed in their early stages, are preventable. Taken together, these lessons emphasize the importance of regular vision screening and the need for a better understanding of eye problems affecting this prone population,” Desai said.
Along with Quillen and Desai, Dr. Zarmeena Vendal, a resident in ophthalmology, is the other principal organizer of the clinic.
The Penn State-Lion Care Ophthalmology Outreach Initiative aims to fill this void by screening patients for common conditions, such as simple refractive error, cataract, age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma or diabetic retinopathy—conditions affecting millions of people in our nation. In the process of providing these services, the medical students will be evaluating and appraising optimal methods of directing vision screening programs to the underserved.
The Ophthalmology Outreach Initiative offered its first screening in August at the Bethesda Mission in Harrisburg. For more information, contact Neel Desai by phone at 717-531-8836 or by e-mail at desaineel@hotmail.com or visit the Lion Care Web site at www.clubs.psu.edu/lioncare. | |||||
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© 2002 Outreach Communications, Outreach & Cooperative Extension, The Pennsylvania State University phone: (814) 865-8108, fax: (814) 863-2765, e-mail: outreachnews@outreach.psu.edu |
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