Child Advocacy
I have to say that I have really found the child advocacy rotation to be beneficial. As residents, we are trained to focus on learning how to address and manage medical issues related to patients, but the advocacy rotation helped me to appreciate the bigger role we have which is to address the social, psychological and legal aspects of a patient's lives which incidentally often affect their health, medical compliance.
In particular, I enjoyed going to the Alliance for Children's Rights office. I had no idea there was an agency that fought on children's behalf to help with things like identity theft, learning disability resources, obtaining SSI and much more. These are issues that often times graduates of "the system" (ie foster children) have to face. I now know that there is a place I can refer my patients for legal services should they ever need that.
