Photo caption: L-R St. Luke’s School of Medicine students Casey Clark, Emily Adams, Natasha Joglekar, Maia Clayton
Every Friday afternoon, students from the Temple/St. Luke’s School of Medicine get together to bake brownies. They meet at the Brian D. Perin Hospice House in Bethlehem to fill the communal kitchen and adjacent halls with the scent of warm chocolate and nostalgia. The weekly baking visit accents a space whose mission is to make families feel at home.
“The Hospice House is such a wonderful place,” said Natasha Joglekar, a second-year medical student in the St. Luke’s University Hospital program. “It’s so peaceful. It’s just like a warm hug.”
The Brian D. Perin Hospice House has served the Lehigh Valley for two decades, caring for those receiving end-of-life support and their families. The Hospice House conveys its purpose through a place that patients can call home.
With 24-hour visitation and inpatient hospice teams, the facility provides much more than palliative care. The Hospice House can introduce aromatherapy, massage therapy and pet therapy to a patient’s care plan. The staff even arranged a penguin visit from the Lehigh Valley Zoo. And now, the house offers a weekly brownie hug.
Through an elective class taught by Dr. Ric Baxter of the Temple/St. Luke’s School of Medicine, students began visiting the Hospice House in 2024. After one class, Joglekar and several students stayed to bake.
“The simple act of doing something for someone else with no intention for acknowledgement or self-gain makes these students remarkable, and I am honored and humbled to be associated with them,” Dr. Baxter said.
The baking excursion provides an opportunity for medical students to connect their education to a sense of place. The communal kitchen sits in the center of Hospice House, and families can visit students and chat if they choose. The afternoon gives medical students insight into how environment enhances care.
“I appreciate being in the physical space and seeing how wonderful it is and how much it brings the emotional volume down for people,” Joglekar said. “People can really just relax, families and patients.”
The activity also ties medical students to their community, a key function of the Temple/St. Luke’s School of Medicine. Based at St. Luke’s University Hospital in Fountain Hill, it is the Lehigh Valley’s only four-year medical school, an example of the unique culture that has made St. Luke’s the top-ranked health care system in the country. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ranked St. Luke’s #1 ahead of Houston Methodist and Mayo Clinic as the nation’s top health system for quality, safety and patient experience—an objective recognition reaffirming St. Luke’s preeminent position as a leader among the largest and most respected health care providers in the country.
“We got feedback from people at Hospice House that the smell just seemed to make the environment more homey, so we kept it up,” Joglekar said. “It’s a really simple activity, but people have a certain nostalgic attachment to baking. It brings up feelings of being cared for. It’s for the environment, because it benefits the families and the staff.”
By cultivating medical students who have Lehigh Valley roots, St. Luke’s is helping to train more doctors and secure the region’s health and well-being. And by visiting the Brian D. Perin Hospice House, those students are contributing more than medicine to the community.
About St. Luke’s
Founded in 1872, St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN) is a fully integrated, regional, non-profit network with annual net revenue of more than $4.5 billion. With 23,000+ employees at 16 hospital campuses and 350+ outpatient sites, it is the Lehigh Valley’s biggest employer.
The Network’s service area includes 11 counties in two states: Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Montgomery, Monroe, Schuylkill and Luzerne counties in Pennsylvania and Warren and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey. St. Luke’s hospitals operate the largest network of trauma centers in Pennsylvania, with the Bethlehem Campus being home to St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital.
Dedicated to advancing medical education, St. Luke’s is the preeminent teaching hospital in central-eastern Pennsylvania. In partnership with Temple University, the Network established the Lehigh Valley’s first and only four-year medical school. It also operates the nation’s oldest continuously operated School of Nursing, established in 1884, and 50+ fully accredited graduate medical educational programs with 500+ residents and fellows.
In 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ranked St. Luke’s #1 – ahead of Houston Methodist and Mayo Clinic – as the nation’s top health system for quality, safety and patient experience. This objective recognition based on hospital data reported to the government reaffirms St. Luke’s preeminent position as a leader among the largest and most respected health care providers in the country.
St. Luke’s has been named a Leapfrog Group and Healthgrades Top Hospital and a Newsweek World’s Best Hospital. It is the only Lehigh Valley-based health care system to earn Medicare’s five-star ratings (the highest) for quality, efficiency and patient satisfaction. In 2025, the Network earned straight A’s from Leapfrog across all of its acute care hospitals. It has earned 100 Top Hospital designations from Premier 11 years in a row, including in 2021 when its flagship University Hospital was identified as THE #1 TEACHING HOSPITAL IN THE COUNTRY. Utilizing the Epic electronic medical record (EMR) system for both inpatient and outpatient services, the Network is a multi-year recipient of the Most Wired award recognizing the breadth of SLUHN’s information technology applications such as telehealth, online scheduling and online pricing information.
Information provided to TVL by:
Gary Blockus
