COMMITTEES

You can hear from our wonderful committee heads here.

 

Health Policy

The Health Policy committee believes that one of the best ways to make long-lasting impact in the quality of care patients at Ben Taub receive is through policy change. Its goal is to explore the role of policy in health inequities in the Harris County through education and action.

Projects

  • Rice Health Policy Hackathon
  • Health Policy Speaker Series
  • Research Committee Support

Presence

Within PDI, we recognize and appreciate how every volunteer, with diverse backgrounds, interests, and perspectives, positively and authentically contributes to our larger mission. The Presence Committee focuses on recognizing and elevating the stories of PDI (including our volunteers and community partners) to our organization and the Rice, UH, and greater Houston community. 

Projects

  • PDI Podcast
  • Humans of PDI
  • Socials
  • “Day in the Life” of PDI members

Volunteer Education

In addition to coordinating our semesterly training events, the Volunteer Education Committee explores ways to better advocate for the diverse patient population at Ben Taub and collaborates with other committees to adapt our work to the current global pandemic. Its goal is to improve the training and implementation of our interventions on health disparities in Houston through advocacy, community engagement, and resource sharing. 

Projects

  • Fall & Spring New & Returning Trainings
  • Healthcare disparities/bias in medicine workshops
  • Spanish volunteer training

Patient Education

The Patient Education Committee explores best practices to teach and support our patient population as well as develops digital, educative materials. Its goal is to provide resources for and support the education of all our patients and clients through both traditional and novel avenues. 

Projects

  • Patient Education Best Practices Project
  • Update resource handouts

Expansion

The Expansion Committee aims to support other college campuses to implement discharge volunteering at their local hospitals. It has already taken the first step towards this large goal with our expansion at the University of Houston.

Projects

  • UH PDI Chapter:
    • Check-in with and support the expansion of the UH PDI Chapter
  • Expand PDI to other colleges in Houston
    • looking into Lone Star, HCC, HBU
  • Follow up on NextStep integration into local institutions

Community Outreach

The mission of the Community Outreach Committee is to work with and maintain relationships with Houston organizations and community partners.

Projects

  • HPV Education Initiative
  • CHAT Health Fairs and Screenings
  • Social Determinants of Health Seminar Series

Research

The Research Committee is committed to rigorously evaluating the impact of our intervention to ensure that we uphold our mission of improving the health outcomes of the patients we serve. We collaborate with several physicians and researchers at BCM, stakeholders at safety net clinics, and professors at Rice. Our research efforts have allowed us to connect with the Population Health Department and formalize our organization in Harris Health’s administrative structure.

Projects

  • NextStep: Developing, field testing, and analyzing an SMS text bot designed to provide community resources to patients at local safety net clinics.
  • Diabetes ED Project: Field testing a point-of-care diabetes test for high risk patients in the emergency department of a public hospital
  • HPV Education Initiative
  • Houston Wellbeing Screening Initiative
  • We also support several projects spearheaded by our committee members!

 

Resources

The Resource Committee is focused on adding, updating, and reformatting the resource sheets that PDI members hand out to patients at Ben Taub. Some specific examples include exploring ways for patients and volunteers to give feedback on resources, working with other committees to improve the quality of PDI resources, and brainstorming how to better train volunteers to give out resources. The Resource Committee works closely with many other committees and is involved in many other committee projects.

Projects

  • Finding novel social resources for our list
  • Working with outside organizations to include resource partnerships 
  • SDOH survey/social service list 

Other Projects

  • NextStep: SMS-platform for remote social resource delivery. A collaboration with RiceApps
  • Vot-ER + Census Initiative