Focus on Community Health Takes Place at OU-Tulsa

More than 100 students took part in the Summer Institute hosted by OU-Tulsa. The program allows incoming students in four health areas — medicine, social work, physician assistant and nursing — a four-day educational experience as part of the School of Community Medicine curriculum.

Now in its 12th year, the program engages students and faculty in interactive, experiential service learning to help students make the connection between health and the impacts of social determinants.

“We are training a different kind of health care provider,” says Jeanne Hayes, M.D., associate dean of student affairs in the OU-TU School of Community Medicine. “Summer Institute is the first time many students get to see the impact the community can have on health.”

The institute began with a presentation about Tulsa’s unique history and a bus tour from one end of the city to the other, traveling primarily down Peoria Avenue — a road that takes you from some of the most poverty-stricken areas to some of the wealthiest in a 10-mile stretch.

During the program students were able to interact with patients who they would most likely encounter. The students — in small teams that included medical, nursing and social work disciplines — conducted patient interviews inside the patients’ homes.

Students were also given real-life dietary restrictions of patients and an amount of money based on SNAP benefits they receive and the size of their family. Participants in the program were sent to the grocery store to purchase ingredients for a healthy meal. One group, for instance, had $11 to feed a family of six. The experience helps these future professionals understand the obstacles patients and clients experience.

The institute featured a poverty simulation where students role-play a family situation in which they are tasked with paying bills, going to or looking for work, getting the kids to and from school or daycare, and paying for transportation.

Students had limited amounts of time to complete requirements at stations representing situations from banks and the workplace to pawn shops, homeless shelters and a jail line each stop or face consequences. Some students ended up in jail or homeless, and there were long lines at the social services and payday loan stations. 

“We have to look at how everything around a person affects them and start to look at how we can impact their health more than just individually,” Hayes says. “We’re going to have to look at the population level to really improve the health and well-being of a patient, and by doing that you improve the health of the whole community — because social problems don’t affect just one.”