Hilton Head clinic helps medical students hone their skills

Volunteers in Medicine has become quite the teaching clinic.

Each month or so, a fresh crop of medical students arrives at the Hilton Head Island free clinic eager to see patients, work under experienced doctors and -- just maybe -- hit the beach.

The third-year and fourth-year students spend as many as six weeks tending to patients under the direction of VIM's 100 doctors, about two-thirds of whom are retired from medical school faculties.

The program has been in place for about five years and is more popular and hard to get into than ever.

VIM takes two medical students at a time, mostly from the Medical University of South Carolina, and two pharmacy students from several universities, including MUSC, the University of South Carolina, the University of Georgia and the University of Kentucky. The clinic also hosts dental and nursing students.

"It started off slow like any program, and now it has picked up steam," said Dr. Frank Bowen, executive medical director of the clinic. "It's becoming harder to get."

The clinic was named "Practice of the Year" by the S.C. Area Health Education Consortium in 1998 for its mentoring of medical school students.

Because of the population of the island and the work the clinic does for poor and uninsured patients, it is considered a rural family practice by medical school standards. Each medical student is required to conduct a rural rotation in either their third or fourth year.

Although the beach and beautiful environs are factors in the clinic's popularity among the young adults, the students say they're eager to apply the skills they've been learning for two or more years.

In that regard, VIM presents them with a diverse group of patients suffering from many ailments, Bowman said.

"The exposure they get to a diversity of conditions and diseases is just way beyond anything they get at a typical family practice," he said. "We also have a variety of individuals they can work with. We have more than 100 doctors, each with his or her own specialty. Some amazing people have retired to Hilton Head."

The students provide an invaluable (and free) extra set of hands, something needed more than ever now that the clinic's roster of active patients has leapt by 10 percent to about 11,000 this year, largely because ofrising unemployment.

After two years of living in laboratories and lecture halls, Hilton Head native Eric Cerrati was eager to return home and see patients.

The 24-year-old is a third-year medical student at Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston who just began his first rotation.

Cerrati, who grew up in Sea Pines and is a 2003 graduate of Hilton Head Island High School, said he was pleased with how quickly the clinic gave him the responsibility to examine patients and present his findings to the supervising physician.

"It's nice to start applying the knowledge I've been gaining over the past two years," he said. "Volunteers in Medicine has been a great help. Considering they have 22 different specialties, it allows me to get experience in all those fields."