I figured we could get a quick start on all the things we decided to do this year as a student group. I think one of the goals was to create a database of all the street medicine opportunities and then making them available to students involved with the Street Medicine Institute and other larger groups AMA, AMSA, Medsin and the like.

I know we each have our own groups, but many of the programs that spoke on the first day of the conference who did not have student representation also mentioned the value of students to their work. Through either the forum or an email thread we could start a running list with one person creating the database from the list. I don't mind keeping track of the groups as we find them.

There's also some websites, particularly for international that have long lists of opportunities abroad that depending on your definition of street medicine would and would not be street medicine. What do yall suggest we do in relation to these lists?

What do yall think we should include about each opportunity we add to the database? For starts maybe,

-The program
-where its at...i gotta two turn tables
-when its available(how long, what months etc)
-Doctor who directs the program
-Program director or coordinator that students would contact to set up the experience
-a short brief about what participants would do and what's expected

I'm excited about the progress we made during the conference and looking forward to working with everyone throughout the year!

favorite quote from the conference - "my panza? you want me to take my pants off?

Does anyone know what happened to all the evaluation sheets people tallied up? Or if you know the results can you e-mail me at emmaavalo@gmail.com ? OSN is looking for them. Thanks!

That sounds awesome Kevin. I think maybe we could add, if applicable:

- mission statement of the program

- attach any articles relating to it so the students can read more (newspaper, films, journals)

- student contacts

Thanks to everyone that was there, I really feel like we're going to get somewhere if we keep up the motivation and passion we had down there by the beach. Let's do this.

Post edited by: elo, at: 2008/09/16 11:42

Alright, first of all you guys are a great bunch, it was a pleasure meeting you at the symposium. Thanks for such a good time.

As to the question at hand, I'd like to see a more involved description of each program that talked about what services each program offers. From the perspective of someone trying to start a program, it would be a great help to know the structure of different street medicine programs and how they serve their particular population. I don't know if this is more involved than what you were thinking of Kevin, but I think that if we do a good job, we could come up with a "directory" of programs that would be useful to more than just students.

Word up.

Definitely like what yall guys want out of the database. As to the amount of detail, I'm in complete agreement with Will. Depending on the amount of prgrams we add, the database could be become long...longer than some students may feel like flipping through.

If this is going to be an electronic database, would it be a good idea to have an "abstract" shorter version of the databse we could make available to different student groups that is then linked to the complete database and maybe a possibly already existing website for the program. Whatchall think?

All of this sounds great. I think we can start now with this, so how about people from each program volunteer to put the information together?

I can do OSN in Pittsburgh unless someone else really wants to.

Maybe someone from each organization can do theirs and then we can cover programs outside of our circle?

I think this sounds like a great first step and a great resource for the group as a whole. I'd also like to recommend brevity in the database with links to websites, when available, for more details.

If you guys want, I'll throw an excel file together tonight (unless someone else wants to beat me to it) and post it to the Documents and Files section of the website. That's probably the easiest place to store it for everyone to add to and then upload it again. If we want to get fancy we could use an online entry form for programs which would add directly to an access db, but we'll have to get Suzanne's help with that.

-Ben