The Clinical Mentorship Program: a mixed-methods evaluation of a community-based medical education pathway program for high school students

Students from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds face structural barriers to entering medicine, including limited access to early clinical exposure, physician guidance, and professional networks. To address these disparities, medical students at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University created a year-long Clinical Mentorship Program (CMP) for high school students in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The intervention combined monthly after-school instruction on basic science content and clinical skills by medical students with structured hospital-based shadowing and guided discussion with resident physicians. Using a mixed-methods pre-post design, the intervention evaluated changes in educational motivation, clinical self-efficacy, medical knowledge, awareness of other academic enrichment programs, and physician access and comfort. High school students demonstrated significant gains in motivation to attend college, understanding of cardiopulmonary anatomy and physiology, understanding of physician roles, comfort interacting with physicians, self-reported physician access, and awareness of local educational opportunities. Qualitative findings highlighted the importance of experiential learning, guided shadowing, a clearer understanding of medical careers, and persistent structural barriers. These findings suggest that community-based programs that leverage local resources, networks, and infrastructure to combine medical education with guided clinical exposure may be feasible entry points into the medical pipeline for students confronting complex socioeconomic disadvantages.