Transformational Learning: Evaluating Transformational Learning in Health Care Students in Volunteer Developing World Service

Health care and health care education are in dynamic transition in attempting to address the increasing demands of a diverse global population across a widening gap in health resource constraints. Health care students must be prepared to care for a much wider patient population across a diverse spectrum of cultures, economics, and technologic facilities with resourceful approaches. Individual students and practitioners of the healing arts, and the educational system that supports them, should undergo transformational learning to address these new realities in expanding paradigms of health and health care. This study was designed to observe health care students and practitioners in the setting of international medical missions in the developing world. Almost all of the participants reported changes characteristic of transformational learning brought about through encounters with developing world patients, and most qualified these changes in both perceptions and practices as profound, life-changing experiences. On the basis of these positive findings, it can be recommended that the opportunity of international health care missions be made more widely available for health students.