FSU College of Medicine 2018 annual report 2018 Annual Report - FSU College of Medicine

2 0 1 8 A N N U A L R E P O R T 43 EXPANDING PERSPECTIVE A CO M M U N I T Y CH E C K U P MEDICAL STUDENT RESEARCH Jeffrey Harman, professor of behavioral sciences and social medicine, and Heidi Kinsell, assistant professor of geriatrics, are working with an international collaboration of researchers on improving care for people who are disabled or otherwise face complex medical problems. Their effort is to find common language and the ability to interpret findings in research involving vulnerable individuals across a variety of health and social service settings. Harman and Kinsell have access to relatable data from countries through interRAI, a collaborative network of researchers and practitioners. Developing such research tools has far-reaching implications in Florida, where assessing health-care delivery mechanisms is an important part of helping the state provide ade uate resources. So if we re looking at the uality of care in Florida nursing homes, interRAI will provide benchmarks to help make comparisons to the uality of care being provided in nursing homes in other states or countries, Harman said. Likewise, if Florida wants to assess community mental health care, you could benchmark your data and compare it to levels of care being provided in New York or Iowa or Canada or Russia or Hong Kong. The first step toward improving health outcomes in a community is also a most basic form of the college s research mission assessing community health. Claudia Blackburn, health officer for the Florida Department of Health in Leon County, and assistant professor of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine, led a two-year effort to produce the Leon County Community Health Assessment CHA . The report, completed in , involved contributions from community organizations and several community members in a partnership also involving United Way of the Big Bend and Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare. The report concludes that while people in Leon County are generally healthy, challenges and disparities are evident in neighborhoods facing socioeconomic challenges. Mental health concerns are fre uently identified as a priority issue, and high rates of sexually transmitted infections and HIV persist. Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine faculty members Les Beitsch and Karen Geletko served on the CHA steering group and a number of FSU medical students participated in conducting door-to-door surveys in neighborhoods throughout Leon County. The next step will be the development of a Community Health Improvement Plan, including the establishment of a set of goals, action plans and evaluation criteria. Through the Summer Research Fellowships program FSU medical students have an opportunity to conduct Ph.D.-level research with faculty mentors and in some cases clerkship faculty or faculty from other colleges and institutions on a variety of clinical and biomedical research projects. In the last two years, students have each received , awards to conduct their research. More than students have been funded since . The stipend is competitive with other summer research fellowships around the country and aligns with trends showing medical students are becoming more and more likely to pursue research experiences, said Suzanne Baker, assistant dean for graduate programs and medical student research. There s an increased interest specifically in clinically based research, Baker said. This past year, we set up a research agreement with Tallahassee Orthopedic Clinic. They ll take a number of our students every summer for projects, and we re working on developing more relationships with community physicians and practices who have an interest in doing research and working with our students.

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