Background: Refugees need assistance from numerous health and helping professionals in their resettlement. Future professionals need to understand the complex barriers faced by this population. To this end, novel community engaged experiential courses are crucial can deepen student empathy, collaboration, knowledge, and advocacy skills to ultimately improve the social determinants that shape the health of newly resettled families. Here we outline an educational method that accomplishes these goals.

Methodology: Students from medical, nursing, public health, and social science backgrounds participated in an elective course, coordinated between two universities. Interprofessional student teams were paired with high-need refugee families. Students attended family events and wrote reflections associated with the chosen social determinant of health topic. Group meetings allowed academic faculty, community leaders, and students to discuss challenges and learning experiences from family events. Students completed pre and post surveys on their perceptions, knowledge and expectations of the course.

Results: Overall, student surveys demonstrated a need for enhanced education on issues related to refugee health. Students specifically reported relatively low confidence with domains related to the social and domestic environments of refugee participants. Students self-reported a high baseline understanding of the social determinants of health. Domains with the lowest baseline level saw the greatest increase after one semester in an almost perfect negative correlation, suggesting that the course effectively improved students’ knowledge and skills in the most-needed areas. Given this finding, educators may consider shifting curricular resources toward more advanced topics such as the skills necessary to conduct environmental risk assessments and home visitation with refugee clients or patients.

Students report that home visitation fosters connection with families and is the most rewarding part of the curriculum. Interestingly, many students predicted in the pre-course survey that they would feel most rewarded by helping refugee families. In the post-course survey, nearly 5x as many students reported reward from the connection itself as they did from helping families. This shift in thinking may demonstrate an increase in cultural humility: learning from and with refugee families, rather than simply delivering a service. This emphasizes the value of these skills in community health curricula. In addition, refugee families reported that they felt supported and appreciated the learners’ engagement and efforts to address their needs.

Conclusion: Community engaged experiential learning is an innovative but challenging way for students to work together, apply their learning, and respectfully engage and build trust with families from diverse backgrounds and needs