During this Community Engaged Learning (CEL) project students, partners and me as teacher worked together on improving personal care for glioma patients. Four honours students from the study Psychology were involved in this project and they were introduced to a patient diagnosed with a brain tumor, a spouse of a patient and a doctor working at the neuro-oncology department of the hospital. Worthful discussions with each other led to new perspectives and ideas for improving neuro-oncological care.

Background

I started this project because I wanted Psychology students to get in contact with the working field earlier. Usually, students have their first internship during their master, in the bachelor they don’t have any contact with patients. This project was therefore specially designed for bachelor students. During this project different goals were formulated. First of all, the students wanted to learn more about neuro-oncological care and they wanted to learn from the perspectives of patient/spouse/doctor. The partner (patient, spouse, doctor) asked the students to collaborate in a project to improve personal care for patients diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Project description

The ideas for improving personal care emerged from discussions between students, partner and teacher. We started this project with a meeting to get to know each other and to discuss aspects of the care for brain tumor patients that could be improved. After that, the students had individual meetings with the patient, spouse and doctor, so that more specific information could be gathered. During the project the teacher had several meetings with the students to check the project’s progress.

Results

Based on the input from the partner, the students came up with different options to improve personal care. The students wrote a proposal in which different ideas were described. One of the ideas was a adding more personal information about a patient in the health care file so that doctors can adjust their interaction/communication with the patient based on patient’s personal preferences. The students formulated a list of personal questions that can be answered by the patients, and they discussed uploading photos and/or videos in the health care file. Some of the ideas the students presented can be used right away, others will need more time before they can be implemented in daily care because of juridical and organizational reasons.

Reflections

During this project, I am convinced that everyone learned from each other’s perspectives. Unconsciously, everyone has certain assumptions beforehand anyway, and they were tackled during this project.

There were also some challenges. CEL comes along with many degrees of freedom. This was sometimes hard for the students, they are not used to this kind of education. For me as a teacher I had also struggles in the interaction with the students. I wanted to stand next to the students because equal relationships are one of the key factors of CEL. However, it was hard for students to see me as a sparring partner, and not as their teacher (who would also grade their project). As a result, the interaction between me and the students remained more hierarchical than I had wanted.

Bringing together students and patients results in valuable experiences and ideas. I really think that everyone involved in this project learned form each other. Both more professional as more personal goals were achieved.

My advice to other teachers would be to give the students the freedom they need, but to also set a clear framework for them in which the project can be done. Furthermore, my advice would be to spend a considerable amount of time at the beginning of the project explaining CEL and the equal relationships that are important within this type of education.