The Making of A Doctor: An Interview with Dr. Lise Alexander

TC:  Do you have a large homeless population here in your clientele?

LA:  Yeah. We do. Or transient housing, moving from home to home – yes. One of the things that our clinic offers, which I think is a wonderful experience, is the Chief Seattle Club in downtown. It's open every morning from eight to nine o'clock for homeless Native American people. And they can go there and they can get a breakfast. And we have one of our nurses there every single morning. And she has a little medi-cart and it has Tylenol and vitamins and a blood pressure cup. It's extremely minimal. But anybody who has a healthcare problem at Chief Seattle Club can see her. And she can evaluate them and if she thinks they need to be in the clinic that day, she can call the clinic in the morning and get them an appointment to come up and see us. And those patients usually show up. We give them all multivitamins. Every time they want one, we give them a multivitamin. We give them Tylenol. We can check their blood pressure. We can make sure that they're doing OK. A lot of them will get cuts and scratches or get in fights and need those examined. And so we can give them dressings and antibiotic ointment. But it's one way that we can reach out into that population and if somebody needs to be seen, they're seen that day in our clinic.

And then if they need to be admitted, we can get them admitted. And many of those people are very grateful for that. And so that's one way we reach out to them and help them. And it's a wonderful experience. I went down there as a medical student. I went down there once a week and first I was kind of shy and embarrassed. And it was, like, I don't know, I can't offer anything. And then I showed up with one of the nurses and I just started handing out a multivitamin. I walked around the room and had this bottle of multivitamins and asked everybody, do you want one? And every one of them, they said, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I did that. And I was down there for, like, three or four Wednesday mornings in the month and talking to people and teasing them and making sure that their healthcare was addressed and telling them they could go up to the Health Board if they had any problems. I didn't think that I was really making a difference. I mean, for me it was more just fun. Hand out vitamins and goof off with people, what more could anybody ask for at eight o'clock in the morning? My very last Wednesday morning they gave me this card and it was signed by virtually every single person in that room. And I realized then that handing our vitamins can make a big difference in somebody's life. It made me cry. All I did was hand out vitamins and these people valued it enough to give me a card and sign it and say thank you.