Interprofessional Community Clinic Offers Medical Students Early Exposure to Radiology
2025;18(2):8
Student-Created Radiology Panel Expands Services, Provides Holistic Care
By Zach Cherian, MS3
Like many of my fellow medical students, I started my M1 year searching for extracurricular opportunities that would enrich and inform my specialty interests. I wanted a specialty that would allow me to interact with every field in medicine, one that would play a critical role in patient care while integrating innovation, creativity, and technology to enhance medical practice.
After much research, I fell in love with diagnostic and interventional radiology, a passion that would follow me throughout medical school. I quickly came to realize, however, that there was one major problem facing medical students nationwide: The opportunities for early exposure to radiology in medical education are severely lacking. Although medical imaging is presented in every block and board exam, medical students are given no more than a passive, surface-level introduction to radiology and its importance in healthcare. That all changed when I had the opportunity to create the radiology panel at Rosalind Franklin University’s Interprofessional Community Clinic (ICC).
The ICC is a local, student-run free clinic that provides healthcare services to the underserved and uninsured in Illinois’ Lake County community. After being selected as the executive officer of radiology, I partnered with ICC leadership to create the radiology panel, a team tasked with the management and operations of all radiological services at the clinic. Using a comprehensive group of healthcare students spanning medicine, physician assistants, and podiatry, the radiology panel built and expanded existing ICC services to provide holistic care for our patients. Panel members not only gained invaluable experience through clinical volunteering, but underwent intense, hands-on training in various imaging modalities (x-ray, ultrasound), post-image processing, presentation, and interpretation. Additionally, panelists participated in the progression of the educational and community goals of the radiology panel, all while developing critical protocols and training modules for services and cohorts. While the panel currently operates x-rays only for the ICC’s Podiatry Clinic, ongoing expansion aims to dive into primary care, orthopedics, and OB/GYN through acquisition and training in chest x-ray, mammography, ultrasound, and CT/MR.
With the help of the ICC Leadership and my amazing team, the radiology panel grew to a cohort of over 12 students in just three months. Two years later, the panel consists of 19 active students and over 25 alumni, all having received a unique and remarkable introduction to the world of radiology. Despite our collective inexperience, we had banded together to broaden our education beyond what was offered in the didactic years of medical school. Through efforts like the radiology panel, students put into practice the abilities and information we learn every day, making us stronger and better equipped to serve our communities as future healthcare professionals. It was an honor to create, lead, and serve in such an initiative, and I look forward to the panel’s continued growth in the years to come!
Radiology Panel Provides Hands-On Experience with Doctors, Equipment, and Patients
By Adam El Hendy Gunnarsson, MS3
Much like Zach, I spent a lot of time during my preclinical medical school years looking far and wide for extracurricular opportunities in my specialty. The only problem was that my field was diagnostic radiology, a specialty that is notoriously difficult to get early exposure to in medical school. We are inundated in nearly every part of our curriculum with imaging findings, yet medical students are scarcely given the opportunity to see the inside of a radiology department until their fourth year. Radiology is a field that’s everywhere and nowhere for most of a medical student’s time in school.
Faced with these limitations, I jumped at the opportunity to be among the first to join the radiology panel at RFU’s Interprofessional Community Clinic. Expecting that our time on the panel would primarily consist only of shadowing doctors and learning about imaging, I was thrilled by the rich opportunities we were given to work closely, hands-on, with the doctors and equipment – even taking x-rays ourselves! In a few weeks, we received a crash course on positioning, collimation, and acquisition of foot and ankle x-rays at the free clinic as part of the first ICC radiology panel. We learned how to tame the ancient, temperamental podiatric x-ray machine and became active participants in every step of the imaging process, reviewing images with the podiatrist that we had taken ourselves.
For many of us, the radiology panel was our first clinical experience in medical school with patients. We navigated language barriers and inexperience, coming out on the other side with skills and confidence to start our journey into the clinical environment. Having a panel of medical students trained to take basic foot and ankle x-rays meant that more of the ICC’s patients could get the imaging they needed, filling a gap in coverage for a highly important aspect of patient care at the clinic. As I navigate third-year rotations, I look back at my experience on the panel with gratitude for the clinical experience I gained and for the opportunity to engage with and explore my interest in radiology early in medical school. Though my interest in diagnostic radiology led me to the panel, my experience on the acquisition side ignited my anticipation for my career and made me sure I had chosen the right path.
