Collaborative community service learning for public health research: A case study from border communities in the Dominican Republic

At the School of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics has developed a nationally recognized Community Service Learning program that provides a bridge between ethics education in the classroom and the development of empathy and humanitarian values in the next generation of health care providers. In 2011, Health Science Center faculty and staff cultivated relationships and established institutional agreements with the Universidad Iberoamericana and the Children of the Nations organization in the Dominican Republic to implement and evaluate an innovative public health intervention to address the ongoing cholera epidemic affecting communities along the Haitian border. While we developed this program with the primary goal of addressing the underlying behavioral risk factors for cholera transmission and other diarrheal diseases in border communities, this program also aims to test the feasibility of a multi-institutional Service Learning site in rural Hispaniola. In addition to learning how to conduct public health research, students from both institutions will gain practical field experiences that will compliment their medical school and public health education. As this is the first international collaboration of its kind at the Health Science Center, the lessons learned during the development, implementation and evaluation of this site will be recorded and utilized to strengthen this program and assist in the development of future collaborative, international service learning programs.