University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Community Health

The Community Health Track provides students with practice-oriented and/or service-oriented learning opportunities related to community medicine. The track provides students interested in Community Health with an immersive and experiential opportunity that blends traditional learning modalities (didactic lectures, roundtable discussions, and individual-paced study) with fieldwork conducting research in collaboration with selected community-based organizations, within the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, working with underserved populations.

Poverty, homelessness, access to care, and unemployment are just a few of the hardships that directly impact health. At UT Southwestern Medical Center, medical students gain the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to deliver health care from a community medicine perspective. Those satisfying the program requirements will be recognized as graduating with the degree of Doctor of Medicine, with Distinction in Community Health.

Through interaction with UT Southwestern faculty, students learn community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodologies and obtain insight into the social and structural determinants of health. Coursework blends traditional education models with field research, giving students many opportunities to work among underserved communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. As a requirement for the Distinction in Community Health, students must complete a research project on a selected topic of interest.