Bridging the Gaps . . . Between Penn and the Community Since its inception, Bridging the Gaps has focused on local communities. As a result, students and faculty learn a great deal about the culture, resources, programs, and lives of residents who may become their future patients or clients. BTG also brings community leaders and people from academe together, which can lead to new collaborative initiatives. “Bridging the Gaps is built on the primary values of collaboration,” says Tuton. Support for the program comes from public
Sixteen years later, Thomas recalls the first nutrition class as if it were yesterday. The Penn students asked where French fries come from. Familiar with fast foods, the kids called out “McDonald’s!” and “Burger King!” “Then the Bridging the Gaps students held up a potato,” says Thomas. “The kids had never seen one before.” Such experiences, she says, “really left an impression on our Bridging the Gaps students about how much our children didn’t know. In Bridging the Gaps, students learn things they don’t get in a classroom setting.” Seeing patients on
“Medical students come with big dreams and idealism, and BTG gives them a way to connect with community early on and make a difference. I can’t stress enough how important this is in the development of professional identity. It was for me, and continues for today’s students.” – Steven H. Chapman, M.D. ’93 Director, Boyle Pediatrics Program, Dartmouth Medical School Medical Director, General Pediatrics Clinic, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center
and private grants and donors and from participating academic institutions. In its 20 years, BTG has exceeded the expectations of both its founders and community leaders. In underserved communities, where doctors are often viewed with suspicion and wellness is often neglected, Bridging the Gaps has become synonymous with health-related service and education – and with partnership and trust. At the Health Annex on Woodland Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia, Lorraine Thomas, its outreach director, had been looking for educational opportunities for her summer-camp kids. In one of its earliest community partnerships, Bridging the Gaps sent medical students eager to share information about nutrition, handwashing, “stranger danger,” and poison control, as part of the Community Health Internship Program.
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their own “turf,” says Thomas, gives the medical students unprecedented insight. “They meet the same people in the ER or in the doctor’s office up at Penn. But when they see [their patients] in the community, it’s totally different. They might get information they wouldn’t get otherwise because [the patients] are more comfortable.” As part of the Community Health Internship Program, a group of BTG students spends seven weeks every year at the Health Annex. According to Thomas, the students are well known in the neighborhood. “The people at the newsstand say, ‘Oh, those are Lorraine’s kids.’” This kind of symbiosis with the community was an original goal for Bridging the Gaps. “People kept talking about building relationships, not just doing things to people, but with people,” Rostain emphasizes. “Over time, a number of our community
partners began to talk with one another and get things done together, and that began to build trust in a place like Penn.” Building that trust, says Abby S. Letcher, M.D. ’95, provided lessons on both sides. Letcher, a student coordinator for the first fully operational year of BTG’s Community Health Internship Program, explains: “Bridging the town-gown divide . . . taught us a lot about perception, about who’s the expert and who isn’t, about what is healing and what isn’t, about what our roles are as medical professionals. The people in the community really deal with these issues day in and day out.” Today, Letcher is on the family medicine faculty at the Lehigh Valley Health Network and serves as medical director for Neighborhood Health Centers of the Lehigh Valley. Inspired by her Bridging the Gaps experiences, she is part of the team that established the first community health center in the Lehigh Valley. “I take the lessons that I learned from Bridging the Gaps and use them every day,” she says. “We ask our students to volunteer, we work to develop respectful partnerships in the community, we have passion for the well-being of our communities, and we are drawing on everybody’s strengths to make it happen.” Recently Letcher collaborated with others to bring Bridging the Gaps to the Lehigh Valley. Another member of the team is Mary Ellen Miller, Ph.D., R.N., assistant professor at De Sales University, who had worked with BTG when she was at LaSalle Univerity. One of BTG’s earliest partners was Frances Walker’s organization, Parents Against Drugs. She recalls that the children there “learned how doctors and nurses are all right, because usually they [the children] go to the hospital in a traumatic situation.” Walker also was a guest lecturer in a course Schwarz and Rostain used to give. “Bridging the Gaps,” she says, “is teaching the students that their patients have underlying [social and