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.
