The relationship between patients needing services and students needing experience should be mutually beneficial, but unfortunately, sometimes service-learning clinics become an exploitation of the poor. Learning on the poor presents ethical questions discussed by George Orwell in his essay, "How the poor die."
However as Arthur Fournier takes a different view, born out of immersion theory as he notes in an editorial,
"The more that volunteers practice differently than their colleagues who treat the poor at most teaching hospitals, the more these services will make a difference. When service learning works, patient satisfaction and learner satisfaction are mutually intertwined, which may explain why such a brief exposure to service learning in a homeless clinic so profoundly promotes future volunteerism." Fournier AM Service Learning in a Homeless Clinic. Journal of General Internal Medicine. April, 1999:14(4):258-259.
Isn't this one of the things we all got involved in family medicine to do. Didn't we want medical schools to do more than just impart technical skills?