Service Learning: Who Benefits?

Over the past several weeks, Drs. Tina Butler and Jennifer Eames have taken us through service learning from just about every angle.

We've talked about mission and measurable goals, explored ways to build a culture of service within a PA program, traveled internationally, built partnerships, trained students, raised money, packed supplies, navigated customs, and learned why sometimes the most valuable person on a medical service trip could be a plumber.

So as we conclude the series, I'd like to hand things back to Drs. Butler and Eames for one final question: Who benefits from service learning?

Perspective Can Be Powerful

Service with a community and its need. But most of the time, people who go out intending to give something discover they've received something, too.

PA students arrive with very different life experiences. Some have already spent considerable time working with underserved populations or people whose lives look very different from their own. Others haven't. Some students simply don't know what they don't know.

Service can place students in circumstances they haven't encountered before. They may meet people facing challenges they've never had to consider. They may see how geography, poverty, disability, transportation, access to health care, or other circumstances affect people's daily lives.

International service can expand that perspective even further by placing students in an unfamiliar culture where they aren't the people who know how everything works.

That's valuable. Because while PA education can teach students an enormous amount about medicine, service can teach them about the people who will eventually ask them to use that knowledge.

Growing Good Humans

Early in this series, we asked a question that has followed us all the way through: How do you grow good humans?

Service is one answer. We want our graduates to be clinically competent, of course. But we also hope they leave us with empathy. Perspective. Gratitude. Maturity. Flexibility.

Those qualities are difficult to teach in a lecture. There's something different about giving your time, encountering an unexpected problem, working beside someone you might never otherwise have met, or discovering that a need you hadn't considered is enormously important to the person standing in front of you.

Those experiences can stay with students long after they've forgotten what was on next week's exam.

Expect the Unexpected

Service also teaches flexibility. If you've followed our international adventures over the past few weeks, you already know that things don't always go according to plan. Maybe a therapy pool doesn't work, customs has questions about your eyeglasses, or your clinic has been operating for 16 hours and there are still people waiting.

And sometimes your first patient isn't even human. On one international trip, before the clinic had really gotten underway, a local woman arrived with her injured animal and asked for help. So yes, our first treatment of the day was on a little goat.

Service asks students to encounter situations they can't completely predict and figure out how to respond. That's not a bad skill for a future health care provider.

Full Hearts

At the end of their webinar, Drs. Butler and Eames used a phrase that captures something people who participate in service often discover:

The giver may come away feeling like the one who was blessed.

You may travel somewhere believing you're going to help.

Then somebody welcomes you into a community. A patient trusts you, or a local provider teaches you something, or a family shares part of its life with you. Your team becomes closer, the people you thought you knew keep surprising you, and you return home grateful for things you hadn't thought much about before you left.

That doesn't diminish what the community receives, and it shouldn't turn service into something we do primarily for our own benefit.

It simply recognizes that genuine human relationships aren't one-directional. Often those who intended to give walk away with full hearts.

That's ultimately why service learning can become so much more than a graduation requirement.

Yes, programs can establish benchmarks, students can log hours, service can support your mission and goals, and you can measure whether students are meeting the expectations you've established.

The number on the spreadsheet isn't the whole story. The deeper outcome may be a student who sees the world a little differently. Maybe they decide that service isn’t just part of PA school, but part of the rest of their life.

Keep Serving

Thanks to Drs. Butler and Eames for sharing their experiences with us throughout this series. As you may know, international service has been an extremely important part of my journey, and I consider my experiences priceless. So this subject is very close to my heart.

Over these past six blogs, we've talked about service close to home and thousands of miles away. We've looked at accreditation considerations and practical logistics. We've discussed benchmarks, partnerships, puppies, plumbers, and everything in between.

But underneath it all has been the simple idea: Service connects people. Done thoughtfully, it can strengthen communities, enrich PA education, and help students become not only capable health care providers, but thoughtful human beings. In fact, it does all of us a lot of good!

I’m glad you’ve joined us for this series! I hope to see you again in the next blog, when we’ll discuss a new topic in PA education.