Background:
To investigate whether providing inter-professional elderly service learning activities to university students can improve their geriatric care knowledge and understanding on patients’ needs.

Summary of Work:
This inter-professional education (IPE) project involved 271 CUHK students of different disciplines across Faculty of Medicine, Department of Social Work, and Food and Nutritional Sciences programme. They participated in 78 sessions of community outreach service and reached out to 3723 community-dwelling older patients.

Students were assigned to carry out various duties during outreach service, such as conducting health interview, providing basic health check-up service, and giving health education to the patients.

Summary of Result :
We conducted pre and post project learning outcome evaluation among the students, and we found significant improvements among the students on following areas: understanding in geriatric care (+17.2%, p<0.05); medication safety (+11.3%, p<0.05); elders’ needs (+9.8%, p<0.05); attitude toward interprofessional education (+67%, p<0.05).

All in all the students appreciated this IPE learning experience as they got to serve with students of other disciplines and able to understand the physical and psychosocial needs of the patients through their direct interaction during outreach service.

Discussion & Conclusion:
Patients play an important role in interprofessional service learning. They are helpful for the growth of healthcare students and the development of high quality patient care in the long run.

Take-home Message:
In parallel with providing health service, students can also learn valuable real world experience from patients and peers of other disciplines.