Different viewpoints are critical for students to learn early in their education. The Community-Based Clinical Education (CBCE) program at UWS gives students experience working with a diverse set of patients in varying health care sites and systems. We spoke with Patrick Battaglia, DC, DACBR, assistant vice president of CBCE, about the ways CBCE enhances student training, patient outcomes, and community well-being.
What is community-based clinical education?
DR. BATTAGLIA: It’s a distributed model of clinical teaching and learning. Traditionally, health science students attend preclinical coursework then go through on-campus clinical education. Sometimes that includes a small number of community-based placements. Community-based clinical education makes that model more distributed. Students have opportunities to be in different health systems, private systems, hospital systems, and so on. With a distributed system, you can take advantage of a bigger network and diverse clinical experiences.
How is CBCE important for students?
DR. BATTAGLIA: It offers a lot of geographic flexibility. For example, students could return earlier to their hometown to engage in real-world clinical education. The opportunity to be back home or in whatever geography they choose gives many students a good career on-ramp. Imagine being an intern in a site where you’re going to be employed later. You’d get a chance to learn the culture, be immersed in the site, learn the patients and the people. You’re going to be more successful earlier.
Community-based education inherently offers students diverse clinical experiences. If you spent all your clinical education in one site, you would see an insulated patient base that might not be representative of the population. Breadth of clinical education makes a better physician, someone who’s going to have more cultural competency, someone who’s going to be able to provide better care.
How does CBCE support local communities?
DR. BATTAGLIA: Students interface with the community early and often. This increases access to services that otherwise couldn’t be provided. Students develop a sense for that community and will be more inclined to give back and participate in other community initiatives.
How does CBCE address inequities in health care and serve historically disenfranchised groups?
DR. BATTAGLIA: Health inequities are often characterized by an access issue. If you have clinical education opportunities in underserved areas, you’ve offered health care services that otherwise wouldn’t be available, whether it’s chiropractic medicine, naturopathic medicine, or other whole-health disciplines.
How does CBCE improve patient outcomes?
DR. BATTAGLIA: Community-based education gives students the opportunity to see significantly more people and diversity of conditions. Future patients are going to be better served by graduates of this program because they’re going to get someone with more experience, more context, and a better ability to provide care.
What other skills do students gain from the CBCE program?
DR. BATTAGLIA: Students develop soft skills that are important for success in practice, things like talking to patients and understanding patients’ perspectives. Students learn to cultivate more empathy, communicate better, and better problem-solve unique situations. It’s important that they get these exposures while they’re students, because it’s going to make them more successful when they get into practice.
How else will the CBCE program position graduates for success?
DR. BATTAGLIA: We’re proactive about cultivating rotation opportunities in private practice settings, in retail health systems, and in large integrated systems. Our students have that range of health system exposure. We know what health care looks like today, and it’s important to prepare our students for that. More importantly, we prepare our students to thrive in the health care marketplace of tomorrow, and that’s going to look very different.