New York – Dr. Sarah Schlegel
Updated July 2003
Dr. Sarah Schlegel is currently a resident in Pediatrics at SUNY Stony Brook. Her past advocacy work exemplifies creative ways to be involved as an advocate as an undergraduate and medical student. Sarah is a strong believer that health care delivery is not confined to the medical office. As a Pre-Medical Intern at Boston Medical Center in the Department of Pediatrics she worked in support of the pediatric staff serving an underserved multicultural patient population. She worked independently to create and execute projects that not only improved the care of patients, but benefited the lives of children and their families in the community. For instance, she developed and maintained a tracking program to help parents navigate the special education system in the public schools so that they might obtain services for their children with special-needs. The success of this service for pediatricians and parents was augmented when she redesigned an information packet for parents about obtaining special education services and established a hotline, enabling present perpetuation of these services. In addition, she created and presented, in collaboration with a local pre-law student, an introductory instructive program on special education services for health care providers.
She also devised and managed many other advocacy projects for the urban pediatric population. They included organizing a hospital-wide children’s used book drive to provide more free books for patients, hosting a beach clean-up for overweight children to exercise and contribute to their community, revamping examination rooms with storybook character murals designed to be educational and patient-friendly, and reestablishing the original Reach Out and Read site. Her active role in advocacy did not stop when she went off to medical school at the University of Connecticut.
Her interest in underserved pediatric populations and an appreciation for Native American cultures landed her in Chinle, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation during the summer between her first and second years of medical school. There she interviewed parents about reading as a preliminary survey before Chinle became a Reach Out and Read site. She was dismayed to hear that the number of books they owned to read with their children numbered in the single digits. Struck by the disparaging differences between the print-rich suburbs of her Connecticut home and the print-poor Navajo reservation, when she returned to Connecticut she began hosting children’s used book drives in local elementary schools; counting, sorting, and packaging the books in her garage; and shipping most of them to Chinle and Fort Defiance, Arizona, in the Navajo Nation. To date, via her program ReBooK: Recycling Books for Kids, Sarah has collected and distributed over 22,600 books from eight schools in the past three years. Besides donating books to the Navajo reservation, she has also given many books to an urban underserved pediatrics clinic, an evaluation center for child sexual abuse, and an inner-city tutoring program in Hartford, Connecticut; the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford, Connecticut; and some of the Meriden Public Schools in Connecticut.
Sarah has been an inspirational student Doc In Action and will undoubtedly continue to be a Doc In Action throughout her career.
