ABSTRACT
Background: Physical therapists need to work not only in hospitals but also in the communities. So it has been said that community-based education should be essential for physical therapy education. In Gunma University, community-based education program was implemented from 2010 for physical therapy stu¬dents. Purpose. The purpose of this report is to introduce our challenging program and search for how this program af¬fected students, community staffs and elderly people. Methods: Third-year students collaborated to exercise classes for community dwelling elderly people with teach¬ers and community staffs (public health nurses and civic volunteers). Two classes were provided separately, so students were divided into two groups and each group was assigned to one class. After classes, reports were written by participants (60 persons), community staffs (9 persons) and students (24 persons). Reports consisted of five-grade evaluation of this program and students for elderly people and community staffs, evaluation using visual analogue scale (VAS) of this program and contact with elderly people for students, and impressions described in freely written sentences for all subjects. Results and Discussion: Results of elderly people’s five-grade evaluation were “5 (very good)”-50 persons, “4 (good)”-10 persons to this program and “5”-41 persons, “4”-19 persons to students. Results of community staffs’ five-grade evaluation were “5”-7 persons, “4”-2 persons to this program and “5”-6 persons, “4”-3 persons to stu¬dents. Results of students’ VAS evaluation were 86.5±13.3 (100 extremely good~0 minimum) to this program and 91.6±9.9 to contact with elderly people. It was expected there were good feelings elderly people, community staffs and students have. There was a possibil¬ity that an interchange between elderly people and students would bring different learning from on-campus classes to students and motivation to elderly people. Take-home message: It is thought that community-based education should be included in undergraduate pro¬grams for physical therapy students.