Otis Moss Junior Medical Center

For the Summer Capstone assignment, I am working at the Otis Moss Jr. Medical Center. This health care facility is nothing like I pictured prior to starting the capstone project on June 6th. Otis Moss is a small health care facility with about ten exam rooms, nestled quietly on Quincy Avenue. Otis Moss offers care to OB/GYN, adult, and pediatric patients and often unites the Baptist religious denomination to their care. If I did not have this capstone assignment, I wouldn't know that this place existed. In order to attract more patients and to provide free health screenings to the Fairfax community, a large portion of the semester has been spent on organizing the annual "Live Long Live Strong" campaign.
The "Live Long Live Strong" campaign takes place annually in July and offers hearing, blood pressure, dental, sickle cell, cholesterol, mammogram, and other screening services of this nature to people of all ages. My partner Kana and I have completed the following tasks to help make this event a success: Contacting heath care providers to attend the fair to provide screenings, Calling, emailing, and contacting area businesses for donations to be raffled off as prizes, Organizing the tables, booths, and chairs and creating the maps for set-up purposes, Registering people for the screenings of their choice, Contacting volunteers and organizing the volunteer assignments, and other necessary tasks needed to make this event possible. Although this experience has been enjoyable, it has been a little hard focusing on our main goal of the semester.
After speaking with pharmaceutical representatives from the MERCK Company, Kana and I discovered that Human Papillomavirus (HPV) has high prevalence in the Fairfax neighborhood of Cleveland and is growing throughout Cuyahoga County. Our goal for the semester is to increase vaccination rates for Gardasil in our randomly sampled population size of 100 current Otis Moss patients aged 11-20. The criteria for selecting our patients to be sampled from included that the patient would have to be aged 11-20 male or female, received testing for the sexually transmitted diseases gonorrhea and chlamydia, and would have to be a current patient at Otis Moss. The patients that had a positive result for a previous STD test were considered high risk, while the patients that tested negative were considered low risk. Kana and I then manually screened the patients charts to see if they have received Gardasil, and if so, what stage of the cycle were they in. For those patients who never received Gardasil or who did not complete the cycle, a letter was sent home to the parents encouraging them to get the child vaccinated. Our goal is that the parents respond in a positive way and that our baseline number of vaccinations increases by 5%.
As the semester is coming to a close, this experience has been fun and rewarding. It has opened my eyes to a whole new kind of nursing, community nursing, and has strengthened my organization and people skills. I am looking forward to finishing our data collection for the project to determine if we have achieved our main goal of the semester.