Student Educational Programs

Population Health Clerkship

Click here to access more information regarding past Community Health Clerkships. 

Click here for information about the 2011 Population Health Clerkship.

International Opportunities

Underserved and Multicultural Pathway

Optional Enrichment Electives

The Bigger Picture:  Health Issues Facing the Community of Worcester

The goal of the optional enrichment course, The Bigger Picture: Health Issues Facing the Community of Worcester, is to expose UMMS medical, nursing, and biomedical science students to the health needs and issues of the community in which they live, study, and train. Worcester’s underserved communities are the focus of the course. In traditional medical training, students see only individual patients, and have limited exposure to the broader community context. Through this optional enrichment elective, students have an opportunity to continue conversations with community members and others knowledgeable about selected issues. For each topic, a panel of three or four individuals provide information about the topic and then engage in a discussion about it with students. For each session, panelists include one or more community members closely affected by the issue, one or two providers who care for people affected by the issue/topic. Topics/issues may change from year to year. For the 2006-2007 academic year, they are: Infant mortality, Homelessness, Environmental Health, Domestic Violence, Immigration, and Drug Addiction.

Understanding and Improving Our Health Care System

The Understanding and Improving Our Health Care System elective results from a collaborative effort between faculty and students to address several important issues that affect health care providers. The main objective of the course is to provide health profession students with an understanding of the U.S. and Massachusetts health care systems so that as future clinicians they can be more effective in delivering appropriate health care to individual patients as well as in improving the health care system overall. The elective couples lectures and clinical correlations with interactive discussions that provide students opportunities to explore how the system works. Access to health care, rising costs, public health, current events, policy, other countries’ systems, and advocacy are among the topics covered in the course.

Rural Health Scholars

Begun in 2000, the Rural Health Scholars Program fosters participating medical and nursing students’ interests in rural health while equipping and encouraging them to practice in rural or small town areas. Through placements in rural communities and small towns, students gain an understanding of the challenges and rewards of practice in these less densely populated areas. In addition, they have an opportunity to network with other health care professionals who practice in these locales.  Click here to view the Rural Health Scholars Program in more detail.