233. Detroit, MI.

234. Detroit, MI.

Heidelberg Project. Detroit, MI.

Heidelberg Project. Detroit, MI.

plainpaul:

A Beacon for Broken Health Care is a collaborative art installment between the medical students of Wayne State and the Heidelberg Project in Downtown Detroit!

Heidelberg is an art community that has come together to rebuild the very fabric and structure of what embodies an under-resourced community.  As medical students we are constantly faced with the struggle of wanting to help Detroiters who, by virtue of where they live, already have “three strikes against them”.  For instance, the Metro Detroit area has over 250,000 uninsured residents, and out of this, there are only enough primary care physicians to serve 50,000 of them.

Through this project, we are not only seeking to engage the community of Detroit, but also to demonstrate what a lack of access to care is doing to under-served communities, and what emotions this is inciting in us as future physicians.  What does it mean for a community when they do not have access to even their basic health care needs?

Through this collaboration with the artists of Heidelberg as well as their Young Artists Association, our installment is going to depict a primary care clinic that should be in this neighborhood, but is not. To do this we are going to be working with used and broken medical equipment from hospitals around the city to represent, and allow people to interpret, what a clinic would look like in this community, but now only exists in our imaginations.

-Alexis Drutchas and Kristy Kelel

creative street. at the heidelberg project in Detroit, MI.