Medical Students Reach Out to Underserved Communities Through ‘Helping Hands’

The APA Foundation’s “Helping Hands” grants were created to help underserved populations while exposing medical students to psychiatry.

Helping Hands was established in 2005. Each year it provides up to $5,000 to medical schools for community-based mental health and substance use disorder projects proposed by medical students. The students create and manage the projects in partnership with community agencies and medical school outreach activities. All projects must be supervised by at least one psychiatrist.

Medical students submit applications in mid-May, and the winners are announced in mid-August. Grant funds are available to medical schools beginning in September. The program year runs from September through August. In 2017 APA awarded 25 grants.

“The Helping Hands grant program is a very tangible way that medical students can learn about the field of psychiatry while making a direct impact on an underserved community with a program the medical students design,” said APA Foundation Executive Director Dan Gillison. “There is no better way to see the impact of your work than to see something you designed make a difference.”

Psychiatrist John Torous, M.D., a psychiatrist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, received a 2011 Helping Hands grant while he was a medical student at the University of California, San Diego (USCD). The grant supported a project to educate medical students and patients at USCD’s Student-Run Free Clinic about early-stage schizophrenia. Medical school volunteers screened patients for schizophrenia and referred high-risk patients to psychiatric services.

Torous, who leads APA’s Work Group on the Evaluation of Smartphone Apps and is co-chair of the Work Group on Access and Innovation, said the grant allowed him to conceptualize, apply, seek mentorship, and plan a budget for the first time. The experience was so positive that it influenced his decision to become a psychiatrist. “The project allowed us to take evidence-based psychiatry, mobilize it, operationalize it, and bring it into the community,” he said. “We were able to take all these best practices and actually do them.” ■