Tri-C Outreach!

Today my group, (Hannah, Jill, Mary Clare and I) went to Tri-C West to market the Cuyahoga County Board of Health’s (CCBH) Family Planning Clinic. The Family Planning Clinic is a title X clinic located at CCBH. The clinic is open two days a week offering a variety of services such as STI testing, HIV testing, pregnancy testing, birth control counseling, and more. Since it is a title X clinic the cost of each visit is based off a sliding scale of household income. This is a great resource for many people without insurance or with limited finances. We set up a booth in the main building of the college with a giant tri fold and various pamphlets. We also created little information baggies filled with candy, condoms, and pocket sized handouts. The little bags were our way of luring the students over to our table to have something to take with them.

We were there from 10am to 2pm and we had around 12 students come up to our booth and talk to us. Some of the females were interested in the birth control options and the possibility of getting birth control for free. Most of the males took the candy and then later we over heard them laughing about our pamphlet of “how to put on a condom.” Even though they were laughing about this, at least our information was getting read and not just thrown into the trash.

From now on every Tuesday 10am-2pm, and Wednesday 4-7pm we will be rotating which two students go to Tri-C and sit at our booth. We will continue this for the rest of our Capstone experience. Our supervisor at CCBH, Sandi, said that every time CWRU students sit at Tri-C they gain a few Tri-C clinic patients. We wore our navy blue FPB polo’s today, but we also planning on dressing in business casual clothes on another day to test to see if we seem more approachable without Case’s name attached to us. It will be interesting to see if changing our attire will make any difference.

Our goal this semester is to increase awareness about the services that the Family Planning Clinic has to offer and increase the amount of patients seen in the clinic. We have been performing outreach throughout the community all semester long, and hopefully outreaching at Tri-C will bring in a large amount of new clients.