Dean's Message - April 2008
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Dear Colleagues:
What's on my mind this month is our community outreach mission. As the nation's oldest public medical school, we serve communities locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Community outreach involves the use of our expertise and resources to provide much-needed education, training and services to help our communities to improve their quality of life. Thus, one of our central missions is to respond to the public's growing desire for accurate, up-to-date health and medical information to aid them in their decision-making abilities in an increasingly complex healthcare environment.
Since we also conduct basic and clinical research, we have an intense interest in educating the public about biomedical research and how it ultimately gets translated into therapies and interventions. Our goal is to engage them in becoming partners in this process so that our efforts will be tailored to their needs and are likely to have a significant impact.
The School of Medicine faculty, staff and students provide over 400,000 volunteers hours each year to more than 250 community organizations. While I cannot possibly list each and every one of the extraordinary outreach initiatives in which we are involved, I would like to highlight just a few.
Locally, we provide a variety of outreach, education, prevention and treatment services to children, adults and their communities. Our Baltimore Community Medical Outreach program, for example, offers an impressive array of outreach services to the local community in the form of interactive workshops on health topics such as HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, hepatitis, hypertension and drug detoxification. Another Baltimore-based initiative, Project Bridges, is a multi-dimensional, home-, community- and school-based intervention program that improves the health, well-being and life skills of pregnant adolescents, their children and families, including mental health, nutrition and social skills training.
We also provide of a wide variety of disease prevention and control services and activities on a statewide, regional and national level to promote increased participation by the public in our many clinical trials. Much of this outreach activity is accomplished through the Univer-sity of Maryland Statewide Health Network (UMSHN), which was established to reduce morbidity and mortality related to cancer and tobacco-related diseases. Since 2000, the UMSHN has provided more than 1,200 educational programs to nearly 55,000 people in the Baltimore region and across the state. It also has provided more than 120 continuing medical education/continuing education programs to more 4,000 health care professionals statewide.
Through the Community Networks Program (CNP), we are working to reduce cancer health disparities across the state of Maryland through community-based participatory education, training and research among racial/ethnic minorities and underserved populations. The overall goal of the CNP is to significantly improve access to-and utilization of-potentially beneficial cancer interventions and treatments in communities and populations that have experienced a disproportionate share of the cancer burden.
Likewise, our Other Tobacco-Related Diseases (OTRD) grant program supports the state's effort to reduce tobacco-related illnesses and deaths by fostering research in health services and clinical and translational research. To date, OTRD has funded 84 groundbreaking projects on such topics as maternal smoking and its effects on infant mortality, nicotine addiction, vascular disease, chronic pulmonary disease, asthma, effects of nicotine on gene expression profiles, and the effects of smoking on kidney disease.
In partnership with the Mid-Atlantic Association of Community Health Centers, we have established 29 telemedicine clinical education training centers throughout the region. Real-time video and computer links enable physicians in rural and underserved communities to confer with our physicians and to transmit of diagnostic images and treatment data. This allows our physicians to provide the highest level of care to patients who would not otherwise have access to our state-of-the-art resources in Baltimore.
Each year, we also offer a number of "mini-medical school" programs throughout the region. These are a series of free public lectures that give adults of all ages as well as high school, middle and elementary students the opportunity to learn about important topics in medicine and health and the latest in medical research. Topics have included obesity, diabetes, AIDS/HIV, chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, nutrition and stroke. To date, more than 2,500 community residents in Baltimore City, Western Maryland, Montgomery County (this program was entirely in Spanish), Southern Maryland and on Maryland's Eastern Shore have participated in our very popular Mini-Med Schools.
This is but a small listing of all the important community outreach initiatives our faculty, staff and students undertake each year. I would like to conclude by emphasizing that for us, outreach is an integral part of what we do in providing care and conducting research. We consider it a key component of academic citizenship.
In the relentless pursuit of excellence, I am
Sincerely yours,
E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA
Vice President for Medical Affairs, University of Maryland
John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and
Dean, School of Medicine