Kennesaw State University student Leah Taylor checks a patient's temperature at the MUST Ministries clinic in Marietta.

At a crowded makeshift clinic behind the steeple of MUST Ministries in Marietta, Kennesaw State University students Leah Taylor and Haley Johnson are learning a thing or two about nursing.

Dressed in white robes, Taylor, 43, and Johnson, 21, are charting patients' weight, height and blood pressure and asking questions about drug allergies.

"You just get better at it the more you do it," Taylor said. Between lectures, labs and hours spent at hospitals, Taylor and Johnson work in community clinics such as this one as part of their requirements toward a baccalaureate in nursing.

Increasingly, nursing schools in metro Atlanta are stressing community service as part of their curriculum. Perhaps no other school in the state incorporates community service, especially with the growing Hispanic population, as much as the Kennesaw State University School of Nursing, where students have started long-running health clinics from scratch.

Caring for patients outside the walls of health care institutions is gaining increased importance.

Undergraduate nursing students at KSU must participate in community outreach programs in each of their six clinical courses. And all nursing students must take a community health course their senior year.

KSU also offers a two-week elective program in Oaxaca, Mexico, that attracts students from other nursing schools. "It's important for our students to be linked to the community and to understand and work in the community they live in," said David Bennett, chairman of the School of Nursing.

Working with patients in their communities is where health care is moving, said Marla Salmon, dean of Emory University's Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing.

"We can probably make our greatest health gains by working in the community and helping people learn how to take care of themselves [to] prevent disease and improve their health."

Starting this year, undergraduate nursing students at Emory will have to do more community service to complete their degrees.

Community service is being incorporated into the undergraduate curriculum as a requirement and offered in more classes, said Wendy Rhein, director of service learning at Emory's nursing school, a position created this year to promote more community service.

Community outreach gives students "an opportunity to put their skills to use and to work with populations that they may not see otherwise," Rhein said. Some of these projects include providing foot care for the homeless and working with farm workers in South Georgia.

Community service is not required for undergraduates at Georgia State University's Byrdine F. Lewis School of Nursing. But in their senior year, they must take a community health class with three hours of lecture and two days a week working with public health agencies, said Krista Meinersmann, associate director of the baccalaureate nursing program at Georgia State.

"There is a shortage of public health nurses to work at our health departments," she said. "We try to expose them to that kind of nursing."

At Mercer University's Georgia Baptist College of Nursing, community service is incorporated into each of an undergraduate's six clinical courses, which may include working at first-aid stations, helping at Special Olympics or doing vision screenings, said JoEllen Dattilo, associate dean for the undergraduate program. All seniors must take a community health course.

On a morning last semester, three KSU seniors taking assistant nursing professor Janice Long's "Nursing 4412: Community Health Nursing" class were at a clinic in an apartment complex taking blood samples and measuring blood glucose levels.

About 10 students helped build the clinic - painted canary yellow by volunteers - earlier in the semester.

Students like Karla Romo have been addressing the health concerns of the complex's mostly Hispanic population. They spend hours at the clinic, plus sit for three hours a week in lectures and do several projects.

Romo and her classmates started in September by surveying 25 percent of the residents of the community with a questionnaire they devised. The questions included what vitamins and home remedies residents take; if they smoke or drink and, if so, how much; whether they have health insurance; and a multiple choice question on what barriers they face in accessing health care.

Based on the survey findings, the students devised and taught classes on diabetes, hypertension, childhood immunization and domestic violence. The students organized a health fair and also did regular screenings and assessments.

"Our focus is mostly primary prevention," Long said. This means that the students give the residents tools - teach them about nutrition and exercise, for instance - so they can live a lifestyle that could help them prevent diseases like diabetes, which has a high incidence among the Hispanic population, before symptoms start to show.

For Romo, the class has been invaluable.

She's been trained to see the patient as an individual. But by being in the patient's neighborhood, "we see the community as a whole," she said, " . . . so we look at the big picture."