USU Students Gain Valuable Experience, Lend a Helping Hand to Underserved Community

By Ian Neligh

The strong desire to help and contribute to an underserved community is a shared motivation among many medical school students from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU).  

Despite their notoriously busy school schedules, these students still find time to help the populations in need in Montgomery County at the Kaseman Community Health Center and have for the past few years, according to retired Navy Capt. (Dr.) Thomas Miller, an associate professor in USU’s Department of Family Medicine, who leads a health rotation at the clinic.  

Kaseman Community Health Center provides medical services to the vulnerable populations of Montgomery County who are uninsured or underinsured adults.  USU students help with COVID testing and administer vaccines from an adjoining parking lot, or help in the clinic, shadowing doctors.

“(We are) truly thankful for every medical student that has come to our clinic from USU,” says the clinic’s manager Carmen Lezama. “They always exhibit passion, fresh ideas, and willingness to go above and beyond for the clinic and our patients.”

For his part, Miller says he became involved with volunteering at the clinic because he has a personal interest in giving back to the community.

“Since I was there and plugged in, it also made it easier to try to arrange different opportunities for interested students to be involved in a variety of ways,” Miller says.

USU associate professor Dr. Thomas Miller stands with his students while volunteering at the Kaseman Community Health Center in Rockville.

The medical school students help with COVID testing, administering vaccines and help in the clinic, shadowing doctors.

(Photo Credit: Courtesy of Dr. Thomas Miller, USU associate professor.)

While the number of volunteering students can vary, he says there are up to two or three working at any given time.

“There are opportunities for our students to be involved from the first day of medical school until the end,” Miller says. “So depending on where they are in school, their role there will vary.”

Miller adds fourth-year students are doing full-time rotations just as they’d be at one of the military treatment facilities.

“I’ll have them go in and take the history and do an exam and come up with what they think is going on, then they’ll present it to me and tell me what they think we should do about it,” Miller says. “Then we’ll go back in and see the patient together, and see if their assessment and plan seems reasonable.”

Because first-year students are less experienced in doing a complete assessment, Miller says they do more shadowing at first, but  he will often allow them to work up to a full evaluation.

“I might sit and listen to see how they take the history and see how they do,” Miller said.

‘Building trust’

During her time at the clinic, Navy Ensign Abigail Hawkins, a fourth-year USU student, says she helped get in touch with clinic patients eligible to receive screening mammograms under Montgomery County’s assistance program, as well as identify other patients due for routine diabetic follow-up testing and exams. 

“I felt challenged in a positive way because, whether I was encountering a language barrier or a complex task, it was an opportunity to learn from the patients and staff at the clinic and use problem-solving to overcome those challenges,” Hawkins says. “… Patients were very gracious in allowing me to learn from their experiences, and it was an important place of growth in meeting patients where they are and building trust.”

Miller says part of the goal behind giving students the experience is to give them an idea of the challenges of providing care to an underserved population.

“It’s kind of a combination of clinical and some administrative and some cultural awareness,” Miller says.  The exposure provides a good learning experience for students to understand a system that does not provide universal healthcare to its patients.   

‘Less scary’

One of the clinic’s services that draws a lot of USU volunteers is the COVID testing and vaccination events, which can draw as many as a dozen students.

Air Force 2nd. Lt. Grace Manno began volunteering because she wanted a way to give back to her community during the pandemic. Manno helps test patients for COVID, during the drive-through events hosted by the clinic.

“Being a first-year medical student, I was in a place where I was learning a lot about patient care but was not directly involved as a front-line healthcare worker at the time,” says Manno. “I found that volunteering to screen patients for COVID was one way I could contribute to patient care. Although my interactions with people I tested in the drive-through were short, I really enjoyed being able to talk people through the test and make it seem less scary.”

Some days can be long, especially before a holiday when people are getting tested before seeing their relatives, but Manno is happy to continue to volunteer.

“Any service to the community, regardless of how small it seems, is valuable,” Manno says. “While spending a few hours volunteering at the drive-through testing site felt like a minor way to contribute, these sites were integral in addressing health disparities in the community.”

Manno says offering COVID testing services and making it accessible to anyone, regardless of insurance or socioeconomic status within a small community is important to help decrease the burden of the disease.

’An underserved population’

Miller says most of the patients at the clinic speak Spanish and some of the USU’s students have some background with the language and find it an opportunity to practice medical Spanish.

First-year medical student Army 2nd. Lt. Brent Bubany, who was previously a Spanish instructor at West Point, says he volunteered at the Kaseman Community Health Center as a translator and interpreter.

“I wanted a way to continue to use and maintain my Spanish, and being able to do so while working with an underserved population seemed like the best way to do so,” Bubany says.  He adds that since he started volunteering last August, he continues to spend his time at the clinic twice a month.  

Army 2nd Lt. Mark Winters, USU class of 2022, says he chose to complete a four-week clinical rotation at the Kaseman Community Health Center because he’s interested in applying to work in Family Medicine and it gave him a whole different look at what family medicine does outside of the military. He also volunteered at the clinic to help with COVID testing and vaccinations.

The Kaseman Community Health Center provides medical services to the uninsured or underinsured adults of Montgomery County. Dr. Thomas Miller

says he became involved with volunteering at the clinic because he has a personal interest in giving back to the community. (Photo Credit: Courtesy of

The Kaseman Community Health Center.)

“There are other ways I could have rotated and many other civilian clinics, but I wanted to spend my time in one with an underserved population,” Winters says, adding he’s interested in working in or operating his own clinic after the military and wanted to see what day-to-day operations looked like at a non-profit clinic.

He says most of the patient encounters he came across were for chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and most of the patients were non-English speakers.

“Some days we had an interpreter there with us and other days we would have a medical interpreter on Zoom to conduct the appointment,” Winters says. 

Winters says his time at the clinic completely changed his view of family medicine and working with an underserved population was a humbling experience. He adds that the clinic staff took time to make sure he was learning and seeing as many patients as he could.

“I woke up excited to get to the clinic every single day and often stayed late. I loved helping provide care for those patients that otherwise would go untreated because of being an underserved population,” Winters says.

“It opened my eyes to all the different things a family medicine clinic does and how different things are from military medicine.”