The community attachment is a practical appointment based in a community setting. It focuses on providing work-setting based education for the undergraduates, an appointment equivalent to clinical appointments at the hospital in medical education principles. The attachment extend through a period of one year and students are expected to visit the community at least once in four weeks and conduct a seminar two weeks after each field visit. The structure of the programme is given in Figure 01.

Figure 01: Structure of the Community Attachment Programme

The batch would be divided into four groups so that around 40 students would work as a group to promote health in the assigned community of 100 families. The students are paired up within the group and five households are allocated to a pair. Thus, the community attachment provides the opportunity to undergraduate medical students to interact at individual and household levels to promote health of a community. Each group will be further divided into four subgroups and are expected to implement a community intervention during the attachment. It will give them the opportunity to interact with other families in the community, community leaders, community based organizations, government officials, health and non-health field workers and other stake holders in the area. The learning outcomes that are expected to be fulfilled are stated below.

Learning outcomes of the Community Attachment programme;

1. Assessment of health status of a community
2. Responding to community health needs
3. Community diagnosis and management
4. Identifying social, economic and political determinants of health
5. Recognizing the need for multi-faceted and sustainable actions for a healthy community
6. Planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of community health programmes
7. Practicing inter-sector collaboration for community health
8. Optimal use of existing systems and networks for community health
9. Effective management of resources
10. Effective management of challenges and opportunities for community health
11. Promotion and maintenance of healthy life styles
12. Community management of common medical conditions

The students are accompanied by a supervisor from the Department of Public Health in the visits to the community. She will provide technical guidance to the individual and collective actions for promoting community health and facilitate reflective learning processes, facilitating the students to achieve the expected learning outcomes.