Hello again, readers! Recently, two of our excellent consultants, Drs. Tina Butler and Jennifer Eames, presented a webinar on service learning in PA programs. They shared not only accreditation considerations that programs need to understand, but also years of firsthand experience building service into PA education.

There was far too much good material in that conversation to leave it in a single webinar! So over the next several weeks, we're going to explore some of their ideas here on the blog.

I'm handing you over to Drs. Butler and Eames to get us started.

Start With Your Mission

Every PA program has a mission, and every PA program exists within an institution with its own mission.

Sometimes, those two things line up very neatly. If your institution is a health sciences center or has a strong focus on health care education, you may find it relatively easy to see the connection. Other institutional missions can be much broader. They may talk about creating lifelong learners, serving the greater good, developing leaders, or living out the values of a faith tradition.

So how do you connect that big institutional mission to what you're trying to accomplish in your PA program?

Service learning may provide part of the answer.

Many institutional missions contain some element of service, even when they don't use that exact word. Concepts such as serving others, improving communities, giving back, and developing compassionate professionals can provide a natural connection between the institution's larger purpose and the kind of health care providers your program hopes to educate.

That connection matters for more than philosophical reasons. ARC-PA Standard B1.01a requires that the curriculum be consistent with the mission and goals of the program. Your institutional mission also typically travels with your accreditation application. In other words, these documents aren't living in separate worlds. Someone looking at your program should be able to see how the pieces fit together.

If service is something your institution and program say they value, what does that value look like in the actual educational experience you're providing?

What Kind of Provider Do You Want to Graduate?

When programs write or revise their missions, one useful question to ask is also surprisingly simple: What do you want your graduates to look like when they enter the workforce?

Of course, you want competent providers. You want graduates with the medical knowledge and clinical skills to care for patients well. But that's probably not the whole answer, because you may also want empathetic providers, lifelong learners, people who recognize their responsibilities to their communities, and professionals who continue giving back long after graduation.

Or, to put it a little less formally: How do you grow good humans?

We think service learning can help programs answer that.

Service creates opportunities for students to encounter people and communities outside their ordinary educational environment. It asks them to give their time, work alongside others, recognize needs, and discover ways their skills can be useful. Those experiences don't necessarily require an international trip or an elaborate program. Service can happen locally. It can happen in an afternoon.

Throughout this series, we'll talk about ways to find meaningful opportunities right in your own community. But we'll also share some lessons we've learned about taking service learning farther from home—including how to plan responsibly for international experiences and build partnerships that genuinely benefit the communities you hope to serve.

In our own program, students have worked with a community organization to build wheelchair ramps for people with mobility limitations. We've participated in projects such as packing backpacks with school supplies. Our students have delivered Meals on Wheels since our first cohort, and we believed so strongly in that ongoing commitment that we carved an hour out of the Monday lecture schedule to make it happen.

Make Service Part of the Culture

If service really matters to your program, students should be able to see that before they ever arrive.

At our program, we talk about service during recruitment. We share the projects our faculty and staff participate in. We look at applicants' previous volunteer experience because we're interested in students who already demonstrate an interest in giving back.

Then, once they're here, we create opportunities for that commitment to continue.

That means faculty and staff model the commitment to service. We involve community partners, families, and alumni. We've even created a class officer position to help coordinate service-learning activities.

We don’t mean every PA program should reproduce someone else's service model. Your activities should make sense for your mission, your students, your institution, and your community. But if service appears in the values your program claims to hold, it's worth asking whether students can actually see and experience that value during their education.

From Mission to Meaning

One of the wonderful things about service learning is that it can connect ideas that otherwise remain rather abstract.

“Serve the greater good” sounds wonderful in a mission statement. Service gives students an opportunity to discover what that can mean on an ordinary Monday morning.

Will it mean delivering a hot meal to someone who is homebound? Or spending a Saturday building a wheelchair ramp? Maybe it means packing school supplies, working with a community organization, or simply contributing whatever skills you have to meet a need someone else has identified.

Those experiences can connect your institutional mission, your program mission, your curriculum, and the kind of PA you ultimately hope to send into the profession. That’s a lot…and that's only the beginning!

In our next blog…

In the next blog, Drs. Butler and Eames will show us how programs can take big ideas like service, empathy, and giving back and turn them into measurable goals and meaningful expectations for students. See you then!