The Shop Docs: Bringing Preventative Care to the Community

In 2016, Annette Grotheer, a fourth-year M.D./M.P.H. candidate at the Miller School, founded The Shop Docs, a program that provides blood pressure testing in barbershops located in Miami-Dade County. The program also provides information on nutrition and exercise to prevent and manage high blood pressure and heart disease. Recent studies published in New England Journal of Medicine and the American Journal of Public Health have found that such interventions have improved the health of participants, such as by providing them with public health education.

Before beginning her medical and public health education journey at the Miller School, Grotheer completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Soon after graduating, she began the NIH post-baccalaureate research and education program at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, which allowed her to conduct screenings for cervical cancer, as well as to work with HIV patients. She credits this experience in inspiring her to pursue medical school.

Since Grotheer did not take pre-medical courses during her undergraduate education, she enrolled in a post-baccalaureate program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was during this program that she began volunteering at barbershops to conduct health interventions, such as blood pressure screenings. She remembers it quickly becoming one of her passions.

“It was a really small community and it was rewarding to work on interventions. I volunteered at the barbershops for a year while I was doing the pre-med classes and then I moved to Miami to start the M.D./M.P.H. program at the Miller School,” Grotheer said.  

In the M.D./MP.H. program at the Miller School, students are required to complete a capstone field experience and project as part of the M.P.H. component. When she began the program, she recalled missing volunteering at the barbershops.

“They’re exciting environments and projects to be involved in. Since I had begun missing it, I thought it would be a great idea to do my capstone field experience and projects on barbershop interventions,” she added.

Soon after, Grotheer founded The Shop Docs through a club at the Miller School called the Student National Medical Association (SNMA). SNMA is dedicated to helping current and future underrepresented minority medical students. It also focuses on the needs of underserved communities and improving the number of clinically competent and socially conscious physicians.

The Shop Docs targets minorities, specifically black minorities, as they have heart disease and high blood pressure more than any other group. Grotheer and the team provide blood pressure screenings, public health education, such as on safe sex, and provide nutritional advice. Currently, the organization is in two locations in Overtown and will expand to more locations.

“We have doctors who come, as well as people from all educational levels, like pre-med students, medical students, and physicians. They all get to work and mentor each other and we’re in the community doing important work,” said Grotheer.

Grotheer said that she and the team try to integrate themselves as seamlessly as possible when at the barbershops. They go on the first Saturday of every month and are there for three hours.

The good thing about the barbershops, she said, is that people go consistently, as they trust their barbers innately. Because of this, Grotheer and her team have had a good return rate.

According to Grotheer, about 30 percent of the people that they screen are repeat participants. “It’s good that we reach new people, but it’s great that we can also touch base with participants and see how they’re doing when they return to the barbershop.”

For her field experience, Grotheer wrote a tool kit to provide people with a training booklet on how to develop barbershop interventions. Now, she also gives it to people who are interested in volunteering for The Shop Docs to prepare for onsite training. The booklet, she said, also gives them a background about the program, on barbershops, as well as on high blood pressure. It also trains them on how to counsel patients about blood pressure and what types of advice they should give them.

“It has a bunch of different resources, such as from different nutritional governmental sources to use to help counsel patients about easy ways to help with looking after their diet and to help meet people where they are in terms of their health on so many levels," Grotheer said.

Currently, she is working on getting a paper published, which is part of her capstone project. She collected data on participants and analyzed whether they were people who do not traditionally have access to health care through their primary care providers or through their insurance. In the preliminary data, they found that they may be catching people at a critical stage, such as when they have most likely been told that they have high blood pressure, but are not having it under control.

“It’s great that we could potentially be educating them encouraging them for more follow up. It’s about catching them in that key time, specifically when they should be transitioning to getting more care and they're not necessarily doing so, which can cause morbidity and mortality,” Grotheer said.  

Grotheer said that she and the team are always looking for volunteers, but are also thankful for the ones who have volunteered, as they have invested a lot of time and have made a difference in people's lives.

To learn more, visit TheShopDocs.org.

Written by Amanda Torres

Published on October 2, 2019