¡Hola!

            My name is Mattea Otten and I’m a second year student from Springville, Iowa. I am majoring in Biology and Spanish and run track at Wartburg College. I am really looking forward to May Term this year and having the opportunity to combine both of my majors and academic areas of interest in a three-week long internship.

            My internship this May Term is at Doctors Care, a health clinic in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. Doctors Care prides itself on having accesible care for the underserved, meaning it provides healthcare using a sliding-fee-scale program for patients that do not have adequate health insurance or even any health insurance or patients who have a limited income. Doctors Care has three to four doctors in the clinic daily and has had over 900 doctors volunteer their time at Doctors Care, including 93 specialists who patients can currently be referred to. Many patients at Doctors Care are Latino immigrants, documented or undocumented, and the clinic sees many patients who speak only broken English and are more comfortable communicating in Spanish. All the nurses and the current receptionist at Doctors Care are bilingual in order to facilitate better communication between the doctors and patients. I’m not quite sure what exactly my internship at Doctors Care will be consisting of, but I am definitely excited to find out!

            

            In order to get to Doctors Care, my fellow intern, Erica Olson and I had to utilize Denver’s public transportation system. At first, this task seemed a little daunting; however, we quickly learned how the system worked and are happy to say we safely made it to and from Doctors Care using both the light rail system and buses, as well as our own two feet.