The Street Medicine Interest Group is one of the newest student organizations on ETSU’s campus.
SMIG is comprised of an interprofessional league of students whose goal is to make a difference in their community.
So far, SMIG has been making a difference through community projects like distributing flu vaccinations, hosting a supply drive and working with the Appalachian Regional Coalition on Homelessness.
“We feel like we’re at our best when we are working collaboratively with various programs and various disciplines because that’s how it should work in the real world, and that success and training is really vital to our patients and our community,” said Jarred Millard, a co-founder of the organization.
SMIG members said some of the struggles they faced when first becoming an organiztion involved getting more than one college within the ETSU Academic Health Sciences Center involved and ensuring that everyone would have equal access to the healthcare that they were providing.
“ETSU has a great interprofessional group program, ” said William Miller, another co-founder of SMIG. “And as far as problems getting off the ground, there haven’t been that many, and the few that we’ve have had simply involved resources which, as soon as we open it up to the community, we didn’t have any problem. There were many donations that we had at our drive during the fall.”
Members said that there are often rewarding moments within SMIG, including giving the homeless population resources and seeing people happy.
“I thought it was very rewarding to get to be a part of all this knowing my help is going to help so many others,” said Kate McComiskey, another founding member of SMIG.
The SMIG coalition is always accepting interested students, both graduate and undergraduate, into their ranks to help and volunteer.
For more information on SMIG, email streetmedicinegroup@outlook.com.
