Andrea Bostrom, associate dean at Grand Valley State University's Kirkhof School of Nursing, spent a recent morning on the phone trying to secure a mammogram screening for a patient who had discovered a lump in her breast.
Bostrom's patient was an elderly resident of the Herkimer Hotel, 323 S. Division. GVSU operates a primary care clinic on the first floor of the downtown Grand Rapids building. While most of the clinic's patients live or work in the city's Heartside district, the clinic is also open for GVSU employees and students.
We started as screening clinic in 1994, Bostrom said. We did the basics: blood pressure, weight, general health maintenance and made basic referrals.
A grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation allowed GVSU to expand services offered at the Herkimer Clinic by adding a nurse practitioner who can diagnose and treat illnesses, prescribe medications and promote healthy lifestyles through education.
The $4.4 million grant is shared by GVSU and schools of nursing at Michigan State University, University of Michigan and Wayne State University. These schools created the Michigan Academic Consortium to work together to educate nurse practitioner students to deliver quality and cost-effective primary care. Like GVSU, the other partner schools have opened health clinics in their respective communities.
The Herkimer Clinic is open 20 hours a week and Bostrom said staff members ¿ including about six nursing students ¿ will see 10 to 15 patients daily. A sliding fee scale is available for patients without health insurance.
It's really beneficial for our students who are already confident with their technical skills, Bostrom said. There can be a lot of prejudice about this particular area of town, and working here allows students the chance to get to know the people.
Here you spend more time practicing what we call the nursing model, being able to teach and doing some preventative health care.
