[music]
LEAD rotations are a novel, service based,
interprofessional course at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, that
brings together different types of
learners from whether they're from the
humanities they're mostly from the
Health Sciences, almost all postgraduate,
and teaches them the very basics of
breaking apart a problem doing a policy
analysis and then how to convey those
results to the legislator. There's a
module part of the course where you're
learning about the legislative process,
you're learning about Illinois
specifically. In addition to that module
aspect there's a practical component of
actually working on a legislative brief
for a state legislator. There are a lot
of forces that act on legislators when
they decide how to vote on a certain bill.
Healthcare is immensely complicated and
the state has a really important role to
play in healthcare. Today we were talking
about prescription drug prices which
obviously is you know, it's a huge
problem nationally and here in Illinois.
These guys gave me some really good
context about that legislation. I feel
well prepared to now go and take on this
issue in Springfield. My goals going
into this rotation was to become more
familiar talking to legislators and
presenting to them. It's nice in that it
gives us a chance to build a skill set
that we can't get in any other
circumstance. I hope that one of the
things that come out of this, is that these
folks have gotten a sense that their
legislators and legislators in general
are just regular approachable people you
can educate and have a conversation with
and that the process is one that you really can have a meaningful engagement in.
This course has really shown me how
I as a physician with all of this
history of medical training can also use
my voice in this political process and
in this process of actually putting
fort of policy that will directly affect
my medical practice and my patients.
I think advocacy is especially important
for people at UIC and people coming to
UIC should value UIC as a place to learn
these skills. Great thing about being
in this institution, it trains and
emphasizes those particular skills and I
think it's something UIC should be very
proud of. Biggest thing that we want out
of this is we want to see them next week
or next year go to their own district
and engage their own State Rep.
