Ohio State medical students connect with youth to promote healthy living

Ohio State’s medical college has a program focused on teaching students to address not only individual but community health as well. Students work in neighborhoods to improve the health of a specific, underserved population.

Abdallah Robleh has been trying to exercise more, playing soccer and basketball, and he’s eating fewer Doritos and drinking less soda.

But getting regular sleep is a bigger challenge: He does great during the week, but he slips on the weekends when he stays up to play video games.

Robleh, 13, is making the changes partly based on what the eighth-grader has learned in the middle-school health-education class taught by Ohio State University medical students as part of a partnership with the Focus Learning Academy of Northern Columbus.

The program is part of an initiative started at Ohio State’s College of Medicine about five years ago to teach future doctors the value of community-based work.

The Community Health Education project, which is required in the College of Medicine’s curriculum, pairs small groups of OSU students with various agencies, where they work with staff members to define needs, develop and implement programs to address those needs, and then evaluate the programs’ success. It’s all designed to help them learn the value of addressing health disparities by taking on the responsibilities of caring for not just individuals but also communities.

“We are using this as a service-learning approach toward community engagement,” said Dr. Mark Troyer, who directs the program. “We feel that this is a skill set that the medical students need to use later on in their lives to be effective doctors, not just with individuals but with individuals within a population.”

For example, students have created projects to address hepatitis B among the Asian population, evaluate methods used to reach HIV/AIDS patients, reduce smoking in pregnant women and help senior citizens navigate the health-care system.

At Focus Academy, medical students have formed SHINE — Somali Health Initiative for Nutrition Education. They teach lessons each Friday, and the middle schoolers eventually visit the College of Medicine. That trip helps give the youngsters hope that they can go to college, said second-year medical student Mubarik Mohamed of Columbus. (And, he said, on a recent trip, the youngsters saw a heart dissection.)

Nearly all of the roughly 500 students at the K-8 charter school in the Northland area are of Somali descent. Some have parents who can’t read and write in their own language, or speak English, so higher education might seem out of their reach, said Principal Travis Budd.

The medical students, he said, serve as powerful role models.

Seventh-grader Sukeyna Jama remembers lessons on the five senses and bacteria and viruses. The 12-year-old said students once were asked to design a healthy dinner plate on a budget, and another time they played a game with a hula hoop. She also learned a song that she sang to her parents.

Madonna Enwe, a second-year OSU student form Maryland, said SHINE has helped her learn how to make complicated medical topics understandable, and she said it has helped cement her desire to work with young people.

Being able to teach them and seeing them light up when we teach them a new concept — they’re actually learning something they’re going to apply in their lives,” she said. “This really affirms what I want to do with my life.

Rana Elgazzar, a second-year OSU student from Tennessee, said medical students know that patient education and preventive medicine are important, but getting to practice those things makes a difference.

“It really allows us to see the value in putting in the time, making sure that we dedicate the time in our future practice to give back to the community,” she said.

The medical school admits about 200 students each year, and Community Health Education can lead to them collectively making a significant difference during their careers, said Dr. K. Craig Kent, dean of the medical school.

We’ve taught every one of our 200 students each year that they have an obligation in their communities,” he said. “We’ve taught them how to think about the community, and then hopefully, over the next 30-plus years of their careers, they’ll go out and contribute in that way.

Dr. Daniel Clinchot, the medical college’s vice dean for education, said that he was taught in medical school in the 1980s that patients in certain situations needed to be referred to services, so they might have received a handout or a visit from a social worker. Today’s students, knowing the challenges that patients might face in getting those extra services, are learning to engage with patients in a different way.

Troyer said community-based programming had long been seen as the domain of public health, and bringing it into a medical-school curriculum — integrating lectures on population health with community-service requirements — is unusual.

“This is a skill set,” Troyer added. “We’re not trying to make doctors who are epidemiologists; we’re not trying to make doctors who are social workers. But we’re trying to make better doctors. And better doctors are ones who understand the spectrum of how patients interrelate with their populations and how to help them navigate.”

 By: JoAnne Viviano

 

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