Treating the community as your patient

Community health intervention can be a highlight of medical school for many students. But what differentiates successful programs from unsuccessful ones? Students with experience in both recently shared their thoughts, with advice distilled down to a simple concept: Listen to your community as you would an individual patient. The students were from Morehouse School of Medicine, in Atlanta, which offers a first-year Community Health course. They were speaking to medical and health professions students at the student-led Health Equity and Community-based Learning meeting, hosted by the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, which is part of the AMA ’sAccelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium. One of the presenters, Stephany Rush, began by underscoring the need for the course —that good intentions alone won’t produce successful interventions. Rush had previously taken part in a private community service project that involved building community gardens in Atlanta. She and others on the project thought gardens were an obvious answer to some of the community ’s most visible problems—poor diet and lack of access to healthy foods.“At the end of it, one lady, she came up to me and [asked], ‘What is this?’” Rush recalled.“This is a zucchini,” she replied.“I’ve never eaten this before,” the woman said. “I don’t even know how to cook this. What do I do with this?” Rush and her partners on the project realized then that they ha...
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Source Type: news