At the retreat I heard some issues regarding finding housing for students doing rotations. One of the issues raised was that if there is a significant increase in student enrollment, this will tie up an ever larger percentage of the CBE staff person's time. In another life when I worked with AIDS patients we had similiar problems finding temporary housing for our clients when they needed to be in a certain city for a particular treatment or whatnot. Of course there were confidentiality issues in play there that CBE wouldn't have so I'm thinking this might work.

One of the most time consuming variables in obtaining housing is finding out where potentially friendly houses/apartments/rooms/etc./ are. I propose that we enlist hospital volunteers, similiar to the Ladies Auxilary League, to generate "hotlists" for us. These volunteers are often retired movers and shakers from their communities and often they have access to information as to who has rental properties, garage apartments, spare rooms, etc. We make the pitch to them that we need a list of people/properties who might host a student doc for a limited time, then the CBE person can work from this hotlist when setting up housing and not waste the time of finding out who will and who won't.