Fully engaged

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Emory faculty, students, and residents engage the community in a variety of creative and important ways. They interact with students in local schools to interest them in careers in science or health care. They care for patients in local clinics for the poor and indigent and in the publicly funded Grady Hospital in downtown Atlanta. They help improve medical training in Ethiopia. They help alleviate suffering in Haiti. Most important, they benefit from lessons to be learned from serving those most in need.

 

In this section

Lift your voices and sing

Engaging fading minds

The new house call

The medical school's role at Grady

Serving the underserved in developing countries

Slideshow key

1. Emory medical and physician assistant students have opportunities each month to volunteer at a nonprofit clinic for the needy. Students take patient histories, perform exams, and present cases to supervising physicians.

2. Emory geriatrician Louise Horney recently helped launch a domiciliary care program in which she and other colleagues see elderly patients during regular rounds at assisted-living facilities rather than having the patients come to them.

3. Emory's Allen Dollar heads cardiology at the publicly owned Grady Hospital for indigent patients. He also helps supervise medical students who coordinate medical clinics for the homeless and travels annually to developing countries to provide short-term medical care.


Lift your voices and sing

Coan Middle School in downtown Atlanta may have lost funding for a chorus teacher, but a partnership between the Emory Voice Center and the Atlanta Opera is providing the school's choral students the knowledge and skills they need to care for their voices. Emory voice specialists teach students basic vocal anatomy, physiology, and pathology as well as proper singing and speaking techniques. Atlanta Opera singers work with Coan teachers to provide choral training—and prepare the students to perform as a group in the lobby before an Atlanta Opera performance. 

Engaging fading minds

The Emory Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, in partnership with Emory's Carlos Museum, has launched Museum Moments, a program for people in early stages of Alzheimer's. Together with their caregivers, they take art tours led by specially trained educators, during which they are invited to share their thoughts and memories. The program is the creation of an Emory medical student who found in her research growing evidence that keeping people with memory loss engaged in social activities is key to improving quality of life and stimulating cognitive function. Participating caregivers report seeing new levels of excitement and engagement in their loved ones, even of hearing stories that had never surfaced before. 

The new house call

Two Emory geriatricians and a nurse practitioner make the rounds at 11 assisted-living facilities throughout Atlanta, armed with a black bag and a laptop with each patient's electronic medical record. This domiciliary care, as it's called, is an Emory outreach program that allows health providers to follow more than 200 elderly patients annually in the context of where they live and to address the small things that help keep them healthy and out of the hospital. They also help patients and families plan for and deal with end-of-life issues. 

The medical school's role at Grady

Emory doctors (faculty, residents, and fellows) provide 85% of physician care at publicly funded Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta, which serves a large indigent patient population. Each year, they provide tens of millions of dollars in uncompensated care for these patients. When Grady patients do have coverage, all payments for Emory services go to the Emory Medical Care Foundation, which invests any proceeds in salaries and other operating expenses to support Emory's mission at Grady. 

Serving the underserved in developing countries

Haiti—Each year, groups of Emory medical students and faculty make trips to Haiti as part of Emory Medishare, a branch of the nonprofit Project Medishare, which advances community health in one of the poorest countries on earth. Emory students and faculty typically see 400 to 500 patients in week-long general medicine or gyn-ob clinics, while Emory surgeons perform procedures often otherwise unavailable in the country. In recent months, Emory Medishare's student-led efforts focused on developing an electronic medical record and referral system in a country without a reliable method to track needed follow-up care. The team uses an iPad and mobile printer to print forms that patients can carry to subsequent visits.

Holland

Emory faculty like geriatric specialist Wilson Holland provide the majority of care at the Atlanta VA Medical Center. Holland organized a project to get WWII veterans to write down their memories of that experience. “Their memories give us and the young doctors we train more insight into their lives and another way to honor their service,” says Holland.

Ethiopia—More Ethiopian doctors practice in the U.S. than in all of Ethiopia, where there is one doctor per 35,000 people. In its growing involvement with Ethiopia, Emory tries to address that dearth, with a medical exchange program with Addis Ababa University (AAU), Ethiopia's largest medical school. The training helps clinically but is also a powerful tool in encouraging Ethiopian physicians and faculty to seek advancement in their own country. Emory is developing a curriculum for a gynecology-oncology fellowship at AAU, focusing on issues like cervical cancer, a big problem in a country without Pap smears or sufficient doctors prepared to treat advanced cases. Other Emory programs include infectious disease, pulmonary medicine, general medicine, cardiology, radiology, and pathology. Additionally, beginning in 2013, Emory will send some of its surgery residents to a hospital in Soddo, Ethiopia, for a six-week rotation, offering young American surgeons new insights into advanced and unusual disease states not often seen in the U.S.


       
 
 

Researchers in medicine and public health joined forces this year with Sophie's Voice Foundation to launch an international research and prevention center with the goal of preventing almost all cases of spina bifida by 2022 and to improve the lives of millions already coping with the disease.


         

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Emory School of Medicine Annual Report