Krishn More (CAS’26, Sargent’26) (right) and Corinne Fairweather, manager of the mobility program at Boston Medical Center, simulate mobility training in the Solomont Simulation Center at BMC July 24. BU student interns in the mobility program learn how to safely mobilize patients recovering from illness or surgery in a partnership that helps students, healthcare workers, and patients alike.

Health & Medicine

New Partnership Between Boston University and Boston Medical Center Gives Sargent Students Valuable Hands-On Experience

 BU/BMC mobility internship is a boon for students, healthcare providers—and patients

Twice a week, Krishn More hops on the bus to Boston Medical Center (BMC), where he clocks in at 8:30 am and starts collecting the supplies he’ll need for the day: printed lists of patients, charts that indicate their relative progress, a gait belt to help patients with mobility challenges out of their beds. He’ll check in with the overnight nursing staff for any updates on his patients and then make his way to their rooms to see how he can help them take a step closer to their ultimate goal: going home.

More (CAS’26, Sargent’26), a senior in Boston University’s Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences, is part of a growing roster of BU student interns at BMC dedicated to helping safely mobilize patients who are recovering from illness or surgery. The BU/BMC mobility internship program, which was piloted in 2023 and launched officially in 2025, is a clever piece in an increasingly challenging national healthcare puzzle. It supports opportunities for hospital staff and students alike—each of whom basically just needs more hands-on time with patients.

“It is fairly well-known that there’s overcrowding in hospitals right now,” says Kelly Pesanelli (Sargent’96,’98), a Sargent senior lecturer in health sciences and one of the architects of the mobility internship program. (She’s right: a recent research letter published in JAMA Network Open suggests that US hospitals are approaching dangerous levels of overcrowding.)

As such, Pesanelli says, “there isn’t always adequate staff to be able to assist patients with their rehab and recovery in an inpatient hospital, to be able to get patients to a point where they can either go to rehab or go home for discharge.”  

This is where BU students come in. Students in Sargent’s health sciences and human physiology programs—who are required to do an internship for credit during their senior year—are placed on patient floors at BMC, where they work as mobility aids for patients who need it. During the pilot phase of the program, BU student interns meet with patients more than 3,000 times, and 89 percent of patients met or exceeded their daily mobility goals, Pesanelli says.

“Our students are trained at Sargent and then follow up with training at BMC on bed mobility, on how to get people from a bed to a chair, from a chair to walking, to walking with a cane, to walking with crutches, to walking with a walker,” Pesanelli says. “All of that training then translates into our students working with actual patients at BMC.”

Typically, patients see BMC physical therapists for about 45 minutes a day to work toward specific, defined mobility goals, she says. Depending on the patient’s needs, these goals might range from being able to turn over in bed to walking 10 steps to walking 250 feet.

Outside of those 45 minutes, though, it’s possible that patients, especially those at risk of falling, may not leave their beds again for the day. This is where BU student interns provide extra support. Maybe they’ll help a patient out of bed a second time or aid them as they walk across the room to take a second trip to the bathroom. All of this extra time—and extra practice for the patients—adds up. Often, it means patients can be discharged more quickly because they’ve gained the strength to safely transition to a rehabilitation facility or home, depending on their care plan. 

“It’s a win-win, because the ultimate goal for BMC is to decrease patients’ length of stays. So then that way somebody from the ED [emergency department] can come in and get a bed, or somebody from surgery can come in and get a bed,” Pesanelli says. “And it’s fantastic for the students because they’re getting the kinds of hands-on experience that, 20 years ago, you could’ve only gotten in a job.” 

Of course, apart from interns and hospital staff, a third population gets a win from this partnership: patients. Free from the critical demands of, say, a full-time nurse’s schedule—which would include a growing patient list, time-intensive charting, liaising with physicians, and much more—BU student interns are flush with perhaps the most valuable resource in any healthcare setting: time. They can spend an hour or two just getting to know their patients, listening to their stories, building a relationship, and understanding the challenges that stand in the way of patients achieving their health and mobility goals. 

Sydney Sadler (CAS’26, Sargent’26) is a senior at Sargent who, like More, is participating in the summer cohort of BU’s mobility internship. Having worked as a nurse assistant, Sadler was familiar with the clinical setting, but found that the time with her patients afforded by the internship has been invaluable. 

“It means a lot to patients to interact with them, have a conversation,” she says. As interns helping patients gain back some mobility, “we spend a lot of time just walking around a unit, making conversation, getting to know people, just motivating them to achieve a goal. It makes me feel really good that I’m getting to make somewhat of a difference in a patient’s life, even in this small way.”

For More, participating in the program has been equally valuable. Trained as an emergency medical technician (EMT), More came into the program understanding the basics of rapid-response patient care, and to some extent, expected this experience to be fairly similar. 

“But now I’ve discovered that it’s a lot more meaningful than that—not only do I get to build up my patient hours, but also it’s taught me a lot about how to engage with patients, how to work with nurses, how to chart properly and efficiently,” he says. “It’s just a great experience to really be in such a dynamic setting where I get to see all sorts of different cases, all sorts of different patients every day, and I get the privilege to talk with them and create a comforting space where they know they can trust me to help them move.”