Medicine has become a profession with increasing accountability to the needs of society. To meet this need, real-world, community-located experiences and reflection are frequently used to promote students' learning and personal growth. This article reports first-year medical students' reflective writing after visiting a primary healthcare clinic. A construct including affective, cognitive and behavioural components was used to analyse the data. Powerful observations were made on students' experience of the health care services available to a sector of the public who are state dependent for healthcare. The study shows that experience-based learning helps students to "see" in ways they have never seen before, and that guided reflection promotes critical reflection and thus transformative learning.