Stanford's Flu Crew, an initiative that gets medical students out into the campus and greater community administering flu vaccines, recently published a paper validating the importance of such initiatives for medical education and public health, and enumerating its best practices so other programs can follow in its footsteps.
Rachel Rizal and Rishi Mediratta were Flu Crew's co-directors when we first wrote about their work in 2012. Rizal is now a fifth-year student and Mediratta a pediatrics resident at Stanford. They are lead authors on the article, "Galvanizing medical students in the administration of influenza vaccines: the Stanford Flu Crew," which appears in the journal Advances in Medical Education and Practice.
I learned a lot about Flu Crew in an email exchange with Rizal, Mediratta, and a host of people they said were instrumental in this accomplishment. Catherine Zaw, a Stanford undergraduate who is a co-author on the recent paper, told me,"The Flu Crew concept has already spread to a couple of schools around the Bay Area, including UCSF, and I hope that with the publication of the paper, more medical schools will consider adopting it."
The article is essentially a blueprint for replicating Flu Crew in other institutions. It describes Flu Crew's innovative online-based curriculum, created by former Stanford medical student Kelsey Hills-Evans, MD (which she discussed in a post earlier this week). It lays out the planning needed to coordinate vaccination events, which in their case involves the medical school, undergraduate volunteers, the Vaden Student Health Center, Stanford's Occupational Health Clinic, and community institutions like churches, libraries, and homeless shelters. And finally, it explains the impact on medical students' attitudes to population health, as one of its main goals as a service-learning program is to provide students with experience in public health and patient interactions early on in their career.
Imee DuBose, MPH, who worked as operations manager at Occupational Health and was inspired by the "impressive professionalism" of Flu Crew's student leadership to shift her career to student advising, told me: "As a public health professional, I see Flu Crew promoting community health through collaboration, and as a student affairs professional, I see student development and growth - this project combines the best of both worlds."
Rizal and Mediratta's successors for the two-year director position, Lauren Pischel and Michael Zhang, were also co-authors. Pischel explained that she thinks public health and preventative medicine are incredibly important in medical education.
"Campaigns like this link the individual you see sitting before you in clinic with the health of the population at large," she said "I would like to see this paper be used to talk about how we can effectively integrate public health teaching and experience into medical school. There is quite a bit of room to grow in this direction."
Previously: Stanford Medicine grads urged to break out of comfort zone, An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory: Med student encourages community engagement, Frenemies: Chronic cytomegalovirus infection boosts flu vaccination efficacy, Flu Near You campaign aims to improve monitoring of flu outbreaks, vaccinations and Student "Flu Crew" brings no-cost flu vaccinations to the community
Related: The Flu Crew: Med students provide vaccinations to the community
Photo, of medical student Lichy Han administering a flu vaccine to Dean Lloyd Minor, MD, in 2012, courtesy of Imee Diego DuBose
