Building, maintaining and repairing the community-campus bridge—five years' experience of community groups educating medical students

Abstract

If health services are to move towards being the people services that the community wants and expects, then there is need for major changes to take place in the way in which health services are planned, managed and delivered. A key factor in achieving that change is to engender the types of attitudes in our health professional students that will allow them to act in a partnership role with the community and individuals to determine their needs and listen to their expertise. By building bridges to the community that allows people in the community to have input and responsibility for health professional education we can epitomise and imprint the type of relationships that we say are important, but often do not exemplify. This contribution describes the process by which a medical undergraduate course has obtained input from the community into its student training, and the programmes that have developed as a result of this partnership. The major thrust, however, is an examination of the reasons why such a partnership should be built and the principles that allow genuine partnership, and therefore progress, to have been achieved.

Key Words:

• Partnership
• community
• health
• student
• attitude
• learning