Making house calls

As a medical student at the IU School of Medicine, Pat Keener's dream was to help people. Now she's making that dream come true. Keener, a 1968 graduate of the Indianapolis-based medical school, is the associate chair of the pediatrics department and chairs the pediatrics department for Wishard Memorial Hospital. She is founder and medical director of Safe Sitter, Inc., a not-for-profit, medically oriented program which trains young adolescents how to be safe babysitters.

Photo by Michael Vaughn Pat Keener (front left in photo) and some of her medical students making spring hours calls. 'Laptop Kids' and other programs provide medical students direct service involvement with neighborhoods.

But one of her most cherished roles is directing the Office of Medical Service Learning, a link between the school and thousands of Indianapolis residents. The office has created successful programs such as "Spring House Calls" and "Laptop Kids," giving medical students direct contact with people who live in neighborhoods near campus, and whose health needs too often are overlooked.

Service has, in fact, become such a popular and productive hallmark the school has incorporated it into its new competency-based curriculum. Steve Kirchhoff, administrator of the Office of Medical Service Learning, said the projects "give students a personal experience with people who otherwise might not see a doctor or go to a clinic. We try to give our kids a sense of their patients' lives by going to where people live."

One of the office's most successful programs is Spring House Calls, in which medical students spend an April Saturday doing yard work and exterior maintenance for people physically unable to do such work themselves.

"A project that began four years ago with just two students and myself now has blossomed into an organization run by students, connecting up to 150 students with people in nearby neighborhoods and using money which comes entirely from donations," Keener said.

The Laptop Kids program started as a pilot project in 1997 to give children from the Blackburn and Haughville neighborhoods near IUPUI an early brush with technology. Laptop Kids has trained 50 volunteer medical students to run the program, which includes 10 two-week sessions at each of two neighborhood sites.

The adult response to Laptop Kids was so strong that Keener and Kirchhoff also created a "Community Computers" program for senior citizens. The three-week program introduces men and women ages 55 and up to hardware, CD-ROMs and the Internet through the efforts of medical students.Colleagues who once might have been concerned about the time medical students spent outside of classrooms, labs and libraries now realize that "the pendulum has swung back toward a balance between service and learning," Keener said. "It's not an either-or proposition."

Keener was the recipient of IUPUI's Bynum Mentor Award in recognition of her performance as an academic mentor in June.

Read more about Safe Sitters at this HP archival site:

"Concern about 'safe sitters' inspires media attention for IU pediatrician" (December 5, 1997)

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