A different kind of rotation: Camp Spifida provides med students with a fresh perspective on pediatric care

For more than 30 years, Geisinger volunteer physicians and staff members have run Camp Spifida, a summer experience for children ages 6 to 18 with spina bifida. Everyone donates their time and many return year after year to give these children a magical week of swimming, rock climbing, riding in hot air balloons and even snow tubing in an accessible environment where nothing holds them back. Over the years, word has spread and, today, children from places as far away as New Zealand come to spend a week in Millville.

Camp Spifida isn’t just a transformative week for the children. It’s also long been a place where residents in Geisinger’s pediatrics, medicine-pediatrics and even physical medicine and rehabilitation programs have come to learn things no amount of time in the hospital can teach. And this year, Phase 3 medical students had the opportunity to be taught these lessons, too.

For the first time in the camp’s history, medical students were able to elect to work at the camp as a formal rotation, according to pediatric clerkship director, Ashley Shamansky, DO.

If the past is an indicator, the students may well join the roster of alumni who make volunteering at the camp an annual effort. “We have a doctor from Lancaster who’s been coming back for 15 years, ever since he was a resident at Geisinger,” said Paul Bellino, MD, who served as Geisinger’s pediatrics residency program director for many years. “And he’s not unusual. Everyone is a volunteer. Nobody gets paid. And the volunteers keep coming back, year after year. The camp really is that special.”