Service to the community has been a cornerstone of Cooper Medical School of Rowan University's values since the medical school's inception. 

CMSRU is special in that students are required to participate in service learning activities to graduate -- that's because at CMSRU, engaging in service to the community is a core component of becoming a physician. 

"Camden is our classroom, Camden is our home," is the refrain. The students' dedication to a variety of service organizations -- ranging from working with kids to doing outreach to neighbors experiencing homelessness -- has helped instill our institution with a spirit of collaboration and engagement. 

This issue of the Center for Humanism newsletter is dedicated to this core CMSRU value. We have invited CMSRU students and alumni to share their reflections on what role service learning has played in their education and their careers. Their responses, you'll see, are incredibly powerful, and a true testament to how service to the community can change everything. 

I grew up only 10 miles from Cooper, yet I was relatively blind to the community’s specific challenges and the special magic that makes it an amazing place to live. That is, until I began getting to know children and families who live in Camden. I aspire to practice pediatric medicine and know that without trying to understand my patients’ home, school, and family structures, I will never be able to provide care and advice that can be actually implemented to ensure they have the best chance at success.

But sitting in a lecture hall and learning about the number of kids who live in poverty or the extent to which Camden is a food desert feels very distant. I only understood how important Homework Heroes was to our kids a few weeks after the COVID-19 pandemic began when a classmate and I dropped off a laptop and school supplies to one of our students at her house. With our new masks on, I got a sneak peek into what her home life was like: she was doing school on the living room couch (the same place she watched TV) because the Wifi didn’t work in her bedroom, the air conditioner was broken, and school’s physical closure meant limited access to free, cooked food during the day. The four hours of weekly tutoring at CMSRU had provided so much more than homework help.

Through Sidekicks, I befriended TT, now 8-years-old, and her mother by accompanying them to TT’s appointments with the pediatric hematologist and occasional hospital admissions. I’ve watched TT grow and flourish over the past four years despite her chronic illness. TT’s resilience and her mother’s desire to advocate for her daughter, despite the numerous systemic barriers they face daily (lack of transportation, difficulty holding a job as a single parent with a child with additional needs, lack of social support), are inspiring.

I often worried that I would be perceived as an “outsider” who was taking advantage of the patients and community members. With time I became more comfortable being uncomfortable and have learned so much. CMSRU’s commitment to the community is something I continue to look for in every institution and program that I join. Despite the doubts I feel as I leave CMSRU and begin residency, the medical knowledge I have worked hard to acquire through medical school would not have prepared me for next steps without the knowledge I have gained from engaging with my Homework Heroes students, TT, and others. As I reflect on my time at CMSRU, I am so grateful for the people who live in Camden for welcoming me into their lives. 

My alarm sounds summoning me from the bed to my downstairs office.  I log in, begin my day by searching my emails before I pull up my cases.  A familiar name greets me, Camron Klotz has sent me an email telling me where his voyage is taking him.  Camron was one of my original TutorTimer’s. 

The concept that birthed TutorTime was rooted in the fundamental principles of service learning: living in the community we serve and learning from the residents of Camden how to serve them best. Camden is a known food desert, a term applied to urban areas in which it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality fresh food.  Camden is also a knowledge desert.  There are two public libraries, one on Rutgers' campus, which is less than hospitable to the children of Camden and the Riletta L Cream Public Library outside public housing, a mecca to the children of Camden. 

In my naïveté, I initially approached the library with my suburban Philadelphian mindset.  I was hoping to read stories to children in garb of fictional characters, something that was very popular in our community.  After meeting with the librarian, Lisa Whitley, and listening to her needs and the needs of the children in Camden, a rough shape formed in my mind.  We would build a service learning experience helping the children of Camden with their homework, expose them to healthy fruits/vegetable, and serve as mentors.  I had no idea that the club would develop so fully and that the bonds we shared with the children and one another would become so deep. 

For all the teaching I did, I learned twice as much from the children and my colleagues.  Many of the children were stand outs, Camron was one of them.  He was in 7th grade when we first met.  He was a gifted and athletic young man with a highly supportive, but economically challenged single parent family.  His aptitude was readily apparent and he was a voracious reader, a passion he had to hide in order to appear “cool.” 

We helped Camron get into Brimm Medical Arts Academy, where he excelled.  We helped tutor Camron through his SATs, and polish his applications for college.  In fact, he asked me to write a letter on his behalf.  As I began intern year, he was a freshman in college at Rowan on a full academic scholarship.  Camron found a passion for medicine and serving others, as I became a Cardiology Fellow, he started a research position at CHOP with the intent to become a physician. 

Camron’s email confirmed my suspicions, he’s in his Masters at Penn, taking his MCAT, and applying to medical school.  He was thankful for my role and mentorship over the past decade.  I am thankful for him. I am thankful for what he has taught me.  Service learning is not just about learning to serve others, but an experience that provides a reminder of the blessings we take for granted.

Camron provided consent for this story to be shared.

When we kill someone for a crime they are convicted of, we inject them with a combination of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride (sedate, paralyze, and arrest). If this regiment sounds like an infusion at an IV bar, you are well-nigh right. A physician wrote the protocol.

Over the course of history, capital punishment has been made more palatable by modernizing its method. First hanging, then electrocution. When we declared that watching people writhe as electricity tears their muscles apart (and cooks them to death) was too unpleasant, physicians came up with something much more bearable. We modernized murder and made it more like a nap.

Like non-depolarizing paralytics hide the brutality of a seizing body, our justice system hides from us the macabre actuality of righting a wrong. Michel Foucault in “Discipline and Punish” writes, “justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice.” In many ways, the actual penalties have “become the most hidden part of the penal process.”

CMSRU empowered me, in my own very small way, to combat this blight. Our service learning curriculum connected me with the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Community Defender Office. In one case, I reviewed the medical records of someone who is sentenced to death and provided information that may be useful to de-escalate the sentence. In another, I explained a neurodegenerative disease to lawyers relocate someone from “normal” prison to a prison with a neuro-cognitive unit that could care for them appropriately, as they inevitably die without penal catalysis. Death comes regardless.

This work does not offer justice to the bereaved, for whom my opposition to the death penalty may not bring solutions. It does, however, leverage medicine in a way that opposes its historical role in capital punishment and other colonialist policies. 

I am so grateful for this institution, which has allowed me to explore my activism—humanism—without criticism. CMSRU has changed my life, and its core value of service is just one of many reasons.  

Upon entering CMSRU, I was under the belief that “service learning” simply corresponded to volunteerism. I understood that students were tasked with interacting with the Camden community, but I didn’t truly appreciate the learning component until I was a second-year student engaged in Care Coordination. 

Care Coordination is our student-run clinic’s social work group that provides our patients with resources to combat housing and food insecurity, transportation issues, and challenges with insurance, among other things. Once a week, I would call five to six patients the day before their appointment and ask them the same set of questions: Do you feel unsafe at home? Do you have enough money to buy food for you and your family? Do you have difficulty affording rent? 

Many times, the answer was an emphatic yes, followed by a story of hardship. Despite being complete strangers, my patients—my fellow humans—would reveal to me the hardest parts of their existence. I would listen as they shared their stories, answer their questions, and try my best to offer them the smallest reprieve: a bus ticket to 3 Cooper Plaza, a number to call for free colon cancer screening, or a location for the nearest food pantry. I didn’t get to know each individual well, but with each conversation, I learned more about the factors that play into how well we take care of ourselves, many of which are out of our control, like zip codes and poverty status. 

As I look forward to next year, I keep thinking about the Care Coordination conversations I had with people I may never know or speak to again. They taught me to take a detailed social history. They taught me to ask all patients about safety in their homes and communities. They taught me to recognize that food and housing insecurity can happen to anyone at any time. I carry these voices with me everywhere. 

Even before starting Medical School, I remember browsing the school website to learn about the different service-learning opportunities available to students. I came across a few that piqued my interest, but Care Coordination stood out the most. “How interesting would it be to work through the lens of a social worker in the student-run clinic?” I thought to myself. Little did I know, Care Coordination would become a significant aspect of my medical school experience. 

Care Coordination goes beyond the limit of providing Cooper Rowan Clinic patients with information on free resources available in the community. Care Coordination pushed me to advocate for my patients and use the resources around me. There were many instances where I had to advocate for Cooper Rowan Clinic patients to access necessary healthcare needs such as vision health, dental health, transportation, and financial assistance programs for medications and medical devices. Making these resources accessible to patients, wouldn't have been possible without the help of Cooper Hospital social workers and professionals from non-profit organizations in the local community. Most importantly, my experience with Care Coordination has taught me to be more open-minded when caring for patients. Patients are much more than their diagnosis, and there’s a multitude of factors influencing their overall health outcomes.

Before volunteering with Care Coordination, I was intimidated by the idea of advocacy and addressing the social needs of patients. I thought to accomplish this, large hurdles had to be overcome, but Care Coordination taught me otherwise. Advocacy doesn’t always have to be a grand gesture and physicians don’t have to know all the answers. This experience has empowered me to be confident in my ability to advocate for my patients and the populations that matter to me, no matter how challenging the task is. It has also taught me that I can rely on the help of other professionals to meet the healthcare and social needs of my patients. 

I walk into the pediatric Emergency Department and see a familiar face lying in the stretcher - it’s my “Sidekick”, a patient with sickle cell disease who I helped navigate the healthcare system as a medical student. It has been 7 years since we first met, and she has grown from a toddler to approaching middle school age.  I remember playing hide-and-seek with her during primary care visits, and today she beams when I walk in reaching to give me a huge hug. Her chief complaint is arm and leg weakness, and the diagnosis is made quickly: a stroke. Discussing this news was devastating, but I was grateful at that moment for my experiences with the sidekick program. I had formed a strong relationship with the patient and family, and was able to be a familiar and trusting presence explaining next steps. Now, as I finish up residency in Emergency Medicine at Cooper University Hospital, I realize service learning at CMSRU has had a profound impact on my ability to empathize and communicate with patients and provide compassionate and humanistic care.

In addition to Sidekicks, I participated in Tutor Time, Girls on the Run, JUMP, and Street Medicine. I remember these activities as a reprieve from studying, and am grateful for the memories and lessons learned.  When taking care of pediatric patients, I can picture my Girls on the Run and Tutor Time students confiding in me about struggling with food insecurity and poverty. When taking care of homeless patients, I have a reference for what tent homes/communities look like and what resources are available to them. I continue to work with JUMP high-school students, and the excitement high school students have towards entering a career in healthcare is contagious and reminds me of why I began the path towards becoming a physician. One of my JUMP students is now a brilliant, hard-working, and compassionate first year medical student and seeing her on her first day at CMSRU was absolutely incredible. 

I have no doubt that the lessons from service learning at CMSRU will continue to impact me throughout my career as an Emergency physician. My experience has shown me that taking care of others is a way to take care of yourself and the secret to avoiding burnout. I am thankful to have learned that lesson early on as a medical student. 

I came into medical school with the lifelong plan of becoming a pediatrician. Surprisingly, my general surgery rotation threw me a curveball and set me off on a path towards pediatric surgery. One would think, based on the historic (and false) reputation of surgeons, that all that CMSRU taught me about equity, holistic patient care, and service to the community would fall to the wayside. But thanks to my incredible experiences in service learning at CMSRU, those values have become integral to my perspective and focus as a surgeon-in-training. I participated in a number of service learning initiatives but the two that have played a huge role in informing my career so far were Sidekicks and Lifting Up Camden’s Youth (LUCY). These activities gave me the opportunity to exist in an incredibly privileged position of getting to know the children, teens, and their families in such a unique way.

In Sidekicks, we worked with Dr. Rafat Ahmed in the Pediatric Hematology/Oncology department to support children with sickle cell disease and their families. This is the first time that I was exposed to just how confusing navigating the healthcare system can be. I worked closely with families to help get them to appointments, discussed how we could get affordable medications, and spent time understanding their unique barriers to care. Dr. Ahmed and I also started the first support group for our patients with sickle cell disease. I am so thankful for the openness these patients and parents had in sharing with us. I learned a lot about inequity of care, especially in a disease like sickle cell disease, that so disproportionately impacts our patients of color. The kids taught me how having a chronic disease can have huge quality of life implications. They couldn’t play with their peers or go out in the snow without worrying about going into a sickle cell crisis. It is a mental burden that I did not understand until Sidekicks.

Through LUCY I had the opportunity to work with teenagers from Camden. I spent a lot of time with the LGTBQ+ youth group and developed amazing connections with these teens. They were such an inquisitive group and had wonderful questions about gender, sexual orientation, how the human body works, and what life is like after high school. I learned that the biggest thing we could do was to listen to their questions and give them vulnerability, honesty, and encouragement. They had a desire for more knowledge and we had the skills to give it to them. I learned that as physicians we have a responsibility to teach and explain and help empower our patients and communities.

Now in my residency at Boston Medical Center and my research fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital, I work with patients who grew up in a community very similar to Camden and who are faced with daily inequities in their access to healthcare. I see patients every day that remind me of my friends from Sidekicks and LUCY. I know to ask how they will afford their medications or get to clinic. I know to ask more about their quality of life and have focused much of my research on the quality of life of another population with chronic disease – children and adolescents with intestinal failure. I also know that asking questions is not enough and I have armed myself with resources and helpful colleagues that make sure we address every aspect of their care. I learned to be honest and vulnerable with my patients to develop trust and to take every visit as an opportunity to empower and encourage our patients in their journey of managing their health. I am endlessly grateful for my experiences in service learning at CMSRU, which provided me with an armamentarium of tools that have allowed me to be the best provider I can be.