Academic Medicine, Service Learning, and the Health of the Poor: A Community Perspective

Service learning has been proposed as a way for universities to expose undergraduate and graduate students to ethnically and socially diverse populations while engaging them in constructive community-based activities. In Washington, D.C., several academic medical centers initiated service-learning programs that placed health professions students in community clinics serving the uninsured. In this article, the authors explore the impact of these programs on the clinics and their communities. A project initiated by George Washington University failed because the health center was unwilling to respond to community needs. A more encouraging model exists in Howard University's efforts to expand services to uninsured Hispanic patients through partnership with a free clinic serving the Hispanic community. The authors conclude that service-learning programs based in underserved communities are most likely to succeed in the context of a full-scale institutional commitment to the health of the target population.