What impact does community service learning have on medical students' appreciation of population health?

Derksen

et al. 2020

Preprint

Background: Community service provides avenues for social learning in medical education. Partnerships between medical schools and local healthcare agencies has paved the path for an active participation of a medical student in the community. This seems to have a positive impact on the medical knowledge and skills of students and also leads to a betterment of healthcare services for the community. National accreditation agencies and medical boards have emphasized that medical schools should provide opportunities for such learning to occur in the medical school curriculum. Various medical schools around the globe have adopted this active learning pedagogy and thus we wanted to explore how we can establish such a learning framework at out university.Methods: This was a qualitative study based on feedback from volunteer students who attended the annual health fare conducted in collaboration with local healthcare agencies. Two focus group interviews were recorded, transcribed and coded for thematic analyses.Results: Overall, the students enjoyed learning various clinical procedural skills. This activity was an opportunity to apply the medical knowledge learnt in classrooms. The students developed various competencies like communication skills, professionalism, team work and social responsibility. Prevalent health conditions discovered by the students included diabetes mellitus, hypertension and nutritional imbalance.Conclusions: This study explores how serving the community can bring about an educational change for a medical student. The community service framework promotes social learning, interprofessional education, peer learning and active learning amongst medical students.

Section: Overall Bene Tssupporting

confidence: 67%

Building Community and Medical School Partnerships: Impact on Undergraduate Medical Education and Research

Derksen

et al. 2020

Preprint

Pedagogy in Health Promotion

“…From the instructor perspective, student reflection narratives throughout the semester served as an informal assessment and allowed the instructor to “check in” with students, identify potential fears or problems, and provide immediate feedback to the individual student or class. From the student perspective, opportunities to reflect on activities and view other student narratives meant that students could help each other reflect on the larger experiences of service-learning, including systems-based thinking, cultural competence, and the social determinants of health (Buckner, Ndjakani, Banks, & Blumenthal, 2010; Essa-Hadad et al, 2015; Kratzke & Bertolo, 2013). These discussion board narratives sought to discover student perspectives on research and reflect how students were processing their experiences of service-learning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, several reports have demonstrated successful approaches to service-learning in public health education that resulted in personal and professional student growth (Bill & Casola, 2016; Celio, Durlak, & Dymnicki, 2011; Essa-Hadad, Murdoch-Eaton, & Rudolf, 2015; Horney, Bamrara, Macik, & Shehane, 2016; Sabo et al, 2015). Throughout much of the 20th century, public health education was largely reserved for graduate students; however, in 2003, the Institute of Medicine recommended that all undergraduate students have access to education in public health, and specifically training in epidemiology (Gebbie, Rosenstock, & Hernandez, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing Service Into Science: Community-Engaged Service-Learning for Undergraduate and Graduate Epidemiology Students

Ylitalo

Meyer

2018

Service-learning is an effective and important teaching pedagogy for public health students that bridges classroom learning with meaningful practice in an effort to meet a community's needs. Undergraduate and graduate epidemiology courses provide unique opportunities for experiential service-learning in public health education. However, best practices and effective examples for implementing and evaluating such experiences have been limited, leaving instructors seeking guidance. The purpose of this study was to describe the methods for developing and evaluating community-partnered service-learning activities in introductory graduate and undergraduate epidemiology courses. We present qualitative and quantitative findings from student assessment evaluations of three distinct service-learning activities over three separate semesters. Findings suggest that service-learning activities are highly valued by students and often represent their first experiences in population health research and primary data collection. Our findings also indicate that these initial experiences are opportune times for students to learn effective and important lessons for conducting health research as well as meaningfully engaging in their community. For health course instructors, the authors provide a timeline for developing such service-learning projects and describe techniques for overcoming challenges that arise in service-learning activity development and implementation.

“…Scholarly literature focused on SL in medical education consistently noted that social responsibility was among the benefits reported by medical students (Beck et al, 2015;Brooks et al, 2018;Chrisman-Khawam et al, 2017;Desrosiers et al, 2016;Essa-Hadad et al, 2015;Gimpel et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Service Learning Can Impact Medical Students’ Perceptions of Social Responsibility

McDonald¹,

Cale²,

Panesar-Aguilar³

et al. 2021

WJSSR

As criticism intensifies regarding healthcare disparities, the Liaison Committee for Medical Education has added accrediting standards mandating Service Learning (SL) in their curriculum. SL is a viable educational method to enhance social responsibility and other elements of professional identity. The problem of implementing highly effective SL projects in medical education was addressed in this study. Kiely’s model of transformational SL was used in this basic qualitative study to examine 10 medical students’ experiences during an SL project. The research question for the study was focused on the students’ descriptions of their experiences to understand how they perceived changes in themselves resulting from participation in SL. Findings from the data collected with semistructured interviews indicated that medical students described SL experiences as beneficial for community integration, educating others, and gratification. They expressed disappointment that they did not know the results of their projects. They related SL experiences that were eye-opening for them and stated that SL influenced their development of compassion as well as their intent to serve their community in their future practice of medicine. The resulting research study consisted of a curriculum plan for a required, credit-bearing SL project. The research contributes to positive social change by the intentional design of a transformative SL curriculum to foster social responsibility development.