Community Health

Catalog description

The Tulane Community Health Clerkship is a 4-week non-clinical rotation focusing on social determinants of health. These are the non-medical aspects of patients’ lives such as education, housing, employment, language, environment, nutrition, and safety that affect their health. The skills students gain in this course are vital to contextualizing care to individual patient needs and addressing broader population health issues. Students meet with the instructor once weekly (twice in the first week) for didactic instruction and group discussions based on readings. Core topics include health disparities, cultural humility, contextualization of patient care, and workforce and programmatic interventions to address social determinants of health. Students also spend approximately 20 hours per week working at a community partner organization where they design, implement, enhance or evaluate an intervention that addresses social determinants of health. Students connect classroom and community experiences through weekly reflective writing assignments and a final presentation.