Youth Clinic Meeting—May 6, 2000
NEXT MEETING: 17th May, Brian’s home. 2204 Channing, 3:00pm to work on proposal. Future planning meeting tentatively set for June 1st (proposal done by then).
PRESENT: Shawn, Jason Albertson (notes), Cesar, Eric, Robert (Facilitation), Brian, Walter, Jessica, Hope McDonald, Dr. Alan Steinbach.
Veterinarian Service Report:
Shawn–Dyveke has connections through parents for vet. Services. He’ll have more information by the next meeting. Jason still is to contact SF SPCA and Vets. Assn. about services and donations.
Legal: Jessica called HAC, no callback, will continue to try. Thalia’s father is requesting more specific information about legal services to be provided. Action steps: Robert will continue to follow this up. Hope will contact Legal Services for Children. Jessica will follow up with Youth Law Center. Hope will also contact Berkeley Youth Alernatives.
Chiropractic: Shawn spoke with Joanna and feels that we will have to do recruiting for chiro on our own. Cannot recruit enough providers for Tuesday night clinic currently and is also running short for Mondays. He has yet to speak with Dr. Prins, will sit down with him on the 16th. Note. Suggestion that chiro recruiting in general for all the clinics will need to improve—the letter writing technique is not making a significant harvest. Hope suggests making contact Life College West or Life West College. Possibility of talking to Dr. Prins about contacting the Chiropractic providers assn. Action step: by next meeting: talking with Dr. Prins. Brian/Hope/Shawn to speak together about outreach strategies.
Medical: Cesar and Eric to put together list of medical and other supplies. Amity will get back to Robert (she’s from Public Health) about assistance for the youth clinic.
Sensitive service discussion:
Wound care (re abscess) would need to be taken care of with public health. Walter suggests contact with medical anthropologist for information on this one. Dr. Steinbach feels that the Youth Clinic could offer a spectrum of sensitive services. Suggests that speaking about youth service needs with other current providers to check out clinic models would be helpful. Unresolved: how to handle STD testing and reporting requirements. Should be on agenda for next meeting.
ACTION STEP—medical will continue to outreach to other providers, government entities and groups to obtain providers and resources to provide sensitive and other services. Jason advocated that such sensitive services as abscess care with minimal judgmentalism and high adherence to harm reduction values be provided. Dr. Steinbach suggested that an alternative model of service provision might be most productive. (bypassing undergraduate case workers).
Medical student/Provider availability: Cesar reports that there were difficulties staffing the Monday night clinics at times; no clinic went uncovered but some volunteers were not able to make commitments and there was a scramble for replacements at the last minute.
Accupuncture: (Hope M.). B/C clinic will only be one night per week, her model of service provision has changed from detox service provision to whole body general acupuncture. Wants to offer spectrum of herbal pharmaceuticals. Sees the acupuncture as a hook for general medical care and western style medical care. Is investigating City of Berkeley monies, Ryan White monies, to fund care provision. Thursday is a good day for her to provide services, Wed/Friday not. Hope raise issues of defining whether or not the drop-in will serve all Berkeley youth interested in receiving services or only homeless youth. Topic was postponed for later discussion.
Social work: (Jason A.) Recruiting goes forward. One individual coming into the MSW school will most likely volunteer. (an experienced case manager for homeless and street identified youth with West Side Mental Health—Sarah Taylor). Hope will contact Maru, who has worked with youth before in SF and feel her out. Not hopeful about recruiting many more MSW students. ACTION STEP: 1–Jason is also attempting to recruit a vocational/employment specialist—Russell Berman. Jason will come to the June 19th meeting to engage in recruiting caseworkers. ACTION STEP: 2—by the end of the summer, Jason will have a security curriculum and training document available.
Optometry: (Shawn)—Opto. school wants to open up new appointment slots (15 per week) for the SC in general which will be usable for the YC as well. Good news.
Education: Robert’s computer is ready to be donated, as is one of Brian’s and possibly one of Jason’s.
Strauss funding—Shawn, start up costs and initial purchases: Believes that the Strauss funding will come through July 1 or thereabouts. (still some questions to be believed). Possible purchases: Food (welcome kits with pet foods, canned goods etc?), laundry machines, dental work, exam table, roll-away for med supplies, massage tables (2, used @ 250 each), med supplies, STD testing supplies.
PROPOSAL for St. Marks.
Proposal creation meeting date: May 17th, 2204 Channing, 3:00pm.
Security: Michael began discussion of insurance coverage with University responsible for property damage. Seems this is a can of worms…most likely the SC is not covered by the University insurance policies. ACTION STEP: Shawn, backup by Brian will seek cost estimate from insurers on both general property liability and glass coverage. Checking what other space users do at this property might be helpful as well. Per Walter, Kate Lorch is in charge of writing letters of support for Youth Industries. Work# 415-206-9945. Kwlorch@hotmail.com.
MISSION AND VALUES DISCUSSION:
Some concern was expressed about the fact that Jason’s version of a SCYC Mission Statement referenced harm reduction in service delivery principles and that the church might have a hard time with it. A further issue was that of how the document was at variance with the existing mission statement document.
ACTION STEPS: Jason will come up with new language for Mission Statement section 1. Robert believes that the YC Mission statement has values which should go into the SC general mission statement and will begin outreach to discuss process of inclusion with Executive Commission members. In preliminary discussions w/ other ex comm. members there was no objection to slight changes or additions to the overall Suitcase Clinic mission statement.
WALTERS PROPOSAL
Walter emphasized that there were three elements of his proposal to be examined. These are:
1) Providing clients the ability to see providers on their own instead of being accompanied by a caseworker at all times.
2) A critical incident debrief/process strategy.
3) A way for discussion/conferencing/troubleshooting and support to take place given the potentially high demands placed upon student caseworkers.
4) A concern that a staff to client ratio be in place that did not result in having more caseworkers than clients.
5) A policy in place that would work to ensure that caseworkers would come to the clinic throughout the semester and develop durable relationships with the clients to enhance service provision. There was no significant disagreement with these elements of Walter’s proposal.
ACTION STEPS:
1) Shawn and Jason are to develop a nightly operations plan for the clinic which will provide guidance for developing some of the group opportunities in Walter’s proposal. (Hope M. thought that having a discussion opportunity to talk about clients was necessary as well).
2) Jason will develop a SCYC caseworker job description.
3) Robert will get Jason (via e-mail) the existing caseworker description. Jason suggested that after an initial assessment, the question of how many caseworkers to staff could be looked at in a directors team meeting that might have client representation at it.
SEE YOU ALL ON THE 17th!