Conferences

General Sessions

Thursday, April 26th
8:15–10 am

Health Disparities and the Need to Build Healthy Communities With Community Participation

America Bracho, MPH, CDE, President and CEO, Latino Health Access, Santa Ana, CA

Health is the result of the interaction of multiple elements. It is well established now that the place where we live, play, learn, and work has everything to do with health. However, people living in the most disenfranchised places have very little influence in the process and little access to resources that are fundamental to changing their circumstances. In this presentation, Dr Bracho will share the key health disparities affecting some populations in the United States as an introduction to the real determinants of disease and despair. The analysis will take the audience to some of the physical places where these disparities occur. It will discuss why these communities are not a priority for institutions and how they will never become a priority if local communities are not meaningfully involved. Examples of interventions to increase participation and accountability, and to build healthier communities in those places will be presented.

Dr Bracho is the Executive Director of Latino Health Access, a center for health promotion and disease prevention located in Santa Ana, California. She created this Center to assist with the multiple health needs of Latinos in Orange County. Latino Health Access facilitates mechanisms of empowerment for the Latino community and uses participatory approaches to community health education. The programs traincommunity health workers as leaders of wellness and change. Dr Bracho worked as a physician in her native Venezuela, after which she came to the United States to obtain a Master’s Degree in Public Health at the University of Michigan. Her Public Health specialty is Health Education and Health Behavior. Dr Bracho is a member of the Board of Trustees for Casey Family Programs and of the Marguerite Casey Foundation. She serves in the Institute of Medicine Round Table and in the Kellogg Foundation Task Force, both on Health Disparities. She has served on the Advisory Committee for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Local Initiative Program. Dr Bracho has been a consultant for the Pan-American Health Organization and taught several international courses in Latin-America.

Friday, April 27
4:45–5:45 pm

The 2012 Blanchard Memorial Lecture The Art of Leadership

William Strickland, Jr, President and CEO, Manchester Bidwell Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA

The foundation of family medicine is the promotion of the health of the individual within the context of the family and treatment of disease through first contact, continuous, compassionate, and comprehensive primary care. Health is also related to socioeconomic status, literacy, educational attainment, and place or environment. Healthy communities are only created and sustained by the combined efforts of families, schools, faith-based institutions, businesses and health care organizations. Health disparities are seen between communities of color and majority communities, rural and urban communities, and among populations of disparate educational achievement.

Bill Strickland grew up in a disadvantaged community of Pittsburgh. He was, by his own admission, detached from his life and education. While attending David B. Oliver High School, he met art teacher Frank Ross, whose mentoring was instrumental in Strickland’s decision to attend college. While attending the University of Pittsburgh, Strickland founded Manchester Craftsmens Guild to bring arts education and mentorship to inner city youth in his neighborhood. The MCG Youth & Arts program, as it is now called, serves public school students by offering courses in ceramics, design, and digital and photography studios.

In 1972, Strickland assumed leadership of a struggling building trade school located near Manchester Craftsmens Guild. Over the
years, Bidwell Training Center evolved to offer programs in fields ranging from horticulture to medical technology. Currently, they are a nationally accredited and state licensed adult career training institution. Since then, other organizations have been added to the mix in an effort to support Strickland’s original mission of empowering educational environments. He has built a model for developing youth and communities, call the Manchester Bidwell Corporation, that has now been disseminated throughout the United States and will soon be modeled oversees.

Strickland’s powerful fusion of mentorship, education, beauty, and hope creates a safe space in which students, young and older, can feel comfortable learning. Throughout his distinguished career, Strickland has been honored with numerous prestigious awards for his contributions to the arts and the community, most recently including Chicago Ideas Weeks 2011 Hero Award, being appointed to President Barack Obama’s White House Council for Community Solutions (2010), Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Presidential Legacy Award for Civic Service (2009), and the Ronald Harmon Brown Award from the Urban League of Pittsburgh (2006). In 1998, he received the Kilby Award and Coming Up Taller Award presented in a White House ceremony by first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In 1996, he received the MacArthur Genius Award for leadership and ingenuity in the arts. In November 2011, he traveled to Tokyo, Japan to receive the Goi Peace Award honoring an individual or organization that has contributed to the advancement of world peace and humanity.

Saturday, April 28
8:15-10 am

Teaching Health Centers and the Uncertain Future of Graduate Medical Education

Frederick Chen, MD, MPH, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

The federal government’s Teaching Health Center (THC) program is a new primary care program created by the Affordable Care Act. By supporting new primary care residencies in community-based settings, the THC program increases the number of
primary care physicians working in underserved settings such as community health centers. This presentation will review the evidence for community-based residency training, the role of community partnership in supporting the THC idea and describe
the translation of research into a new health workforce program. Teaching Health Centers are also the products of renewed discussions about how we provide and pay for Graduate medical education (GME) in the United States. Medicare currently spends
over $9.5 billion per year to support residency training. This system of GME payments to teaching hospitals was subject to great scrutiny during this year’s Congressional deficit reduction discussions. Longstanding questions about the effectiveness of GME payments have come into conflict with the very survival of the nation’s teaching hospitals and medical schools.

Dr Chen is associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Washington and chief of Family Medicine at Harborview Medical Center. He attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco and received his MPH in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley. After completing his residency in family medicine at the University of Washington, Dr Chen was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, where he developed his research interest in health policy and medical education. He pursued this interest as a Kerr White Scholar at the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and as an Atlantic Fellow in public health policy at University College London. At the University of Washington, he has been one of the lead faculty for the medical school’s Underserved Pathway, medical director for the Washington State Patient-Centered Medical Home Collaborative, and an investigator in the WWAMI Rural Health Research Center. He currently chairs the medical school’s required course in health policy and serves as senior advisor to HRSA’s Bureau of Health Professions.

Sunday, April 29
9:15–10:30 am

Teach Your Children Well—Or the Curriculum Is Only a Good Place to Start

Richard Kovar, MD, FAAFP, Providence Family Medicine, Seattle, WA

Central to all the work I have done has been life-long learning from students and colleagues and teaching our craft to anyone willing to listen. I have always felt that teaching is partly what we say to our students and partly how we walk the talk. From a generation of teaching in a wide variety of settings, some of them mundane, some rather dramatic, I have always felt that the best teaching involves sharing what we are most passionate about – sharing our humanity, hopes and fears in the process. The “curriculum” is a good place to start but is only a guide that must be brought to life with vigor, creativity, and humility. I will share teaching stories from the commonplace to the exotic that have helped me synthesize some basic truths and concepts about primary care across settings and cultures. I will share some concepts I have found worth keeping and refining over the years (my brand of patient-centered communication) and those I have abandoned (that family physicians are somehow more “patient centered” than other primary care professions and specialties). Like any coach, I have my playbook and I will share it with you other coaches since we are all on the same teaching team. In addition, I will share some reflections from colleagues who did their family medicine training at my community health center years ago and ended up working in the safety net. We know a lot about how students evaluate us proximate to their training period, but less about how they reflect back on what they learned that stuck with them over time. 

Dr Kovar has worked his entire career in the health care safety net since finishing his family medicine residency at Oregon Health & Science University in 1984 after an internship at Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington, NJ and a stint as a general
practitioner. He grew up in New Jersey, went to college at the University of Rochester, and graduated from medical school at George Washington University. Despite his Dean’s better judgment, he chose a career in family medicine and never looked back. It has taken him to work in nine countries on five continents including war zones and famines, several stints in rural practice, five Native American reservations, and a farmworker clinic. Most satisfying has been his long term commitment to the urban underserved
at Country Doctor Community Health Centers in Seattle where he practices full spectrum family medicine, including obstetrics and hospital attending, and serves as medical director. He mentors students in middle and high school as well as pre-med students. As a clinical professor of family medicine at the University of Washington, he teaches students in all four years of medical school as well as family medicine residents from Swedish Medical Center and Group Health Cooperative in Seattle. In addition, Dr Kovar has a rather macabre “sub-specialty” of forensic examination of asylum seekers and teaches this skill to students and local physicians. He has a wonderful supportive family that includes his wife Bernie and two teenage kids, Aaron and Heather, who have taught him most of what he knows about pediatrics and adolescent medicine, and not always the easy way.