Health care policies and welfare reform may not directly affect most Harvard students, but some undergraduates have still found a way to make these issues part of their daily lives.

For many area residents, pursuing health care and federal assistance can prove daunting as regulatory bureaucracy necessitates the filing of a myriad of forms.

Project HEALTH (Helping Empower, Advocate and Lead Through Health) is a new service program administered through the Institute of Politics. Using a multi-disciplinary approach to health care, undergraduates advocate for patients at Boston City Hospital.

The program has three parts: service, mentorship and reflection. Undergraduates are paired with mentors, who are physicians, attorneys or social workers at the hospital.

Under the guidance of their mentors, the students research a health care-related problem. That can entail interviewing clients who are referred to lawyers or conducting surveys of patients' parents in the pediatrics waiting room.

The next step in the service portion of Project HEALTH is to implement a program in the hospital or to represent an individual patient's case.

Projects

Projects on which other volunteers have worked over the past year have included the creation of an asthma-education curriculum in inner-city schools where poor housing conditions aggravate asthma, and a "Human Faces" project, through which undergraduates record in print and film the stories of the hospital's clients.

The volunteers also attend weekly reflection sessions, at which they share the experiences they've had at the hospital or listen to speakers on a variety of health care issues such as the impact of the November elections on children.

Founder Rebecca D. Onie '98-'97 says she got the idea for Project HEALTH last year after reading a multi-disciplinary approach to health care in The Boston Globe.

The article profiled Dr. Barry Zuckerman, who instituted such an approach in the pediatrics department of Boston City Hospital (BCH), which he chairs.

Onie called Zuckerman with the idea of beginning a similar program at Harvard, and he wanted to tackle it immediately. She spent last fall meeting with physicians, lawyers and social-workers at the hospital to develop the framework for Project HEALTH.

Last spring, the first 10 undergraduates participated on a trial basis. This year, the organization has doubled its number of volunteers, mentors and programs.

Profile of a Volunteer

Sitting across from an elderly sage in a rural community in India last year, Sumedha Lamba '98-'99 became convinced that medicine was her calling.

During a year away from Harvard, Lamba, having just finished her first year, visited the seer in her birthplace who had counseled her mother 20 years earlier.