Developing an Ownership Model for Experiential Learning of Social Determinants of Health for Medical Residents

Historically, community engagement activities for Ochsner Health internal medicine residents were primarily task-based, involving opportunities to participate in a food drive or a community education project. As an alternative approach, we aimed to create a model that reflected residents' collective interests, could be meaningfully linked to a community issue, and fostered ownership and sustainability in community engagement.

This project was conducted at Ochsner Medical Center in the internal medicine residency program during the 2022-2023 academic year with ambulatory clinic groups A, B, and C. In September 2022, we asked each group to respond to the following prompt: "Please identify an issue that you feel most passionate about and would like to contribute to." Once we identified the issues of interest based on responses and group discussion, we partnered with the community-based organization Giving Hope Foundation New Orleans to plan and carry out projects reflecting resident interests.

Clinic Group A and Group B selected promoting health education as their project and provided one-on-one education based on a resident-prepared health brochure. Five residents participated in the education outreach project for a total of 40 educational encounters. For their project, clinic Group C organized a health fair to promote health education, disease screening, and access. The health fair stations included blood pressure and body mass index screening, nutritional counseling, Medicare/Medicaid application assistance, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation training. The total number of encounters during the event was 100.

Our model showed the possibility of facilitating ownership in the community engagement process among medical residents. However, sustainability depends on replication and incorporation into the residency curriculum.