The Arnold P. Gold Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2019-2021 Picker Gold Graduate Medical Education Challenge Grants, two exceptional projects designed to improve compassionate, patient-centered care and foster excellent communication skills in the clinical learning environment.
The awardees are:
- Ashley Fernandes, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Ambulatory Medicine, and Associate Director, Center for Bioethics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Dr. Fernandes’ grant supports the development of a humanistic bioethics curriculum to promote patient-centered care. He is also a member of the Gold Humanism Honor Society and received the Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award in 2010.
- Raquel Greer, MD, MHS, Assistant Professor, Division of General Medicine, Education Director at Johns Hopkins Brancati Center for the Advancement of Community Care, and Core Faculty at Johns Hopkins Center of Health Equity. Dr. Greer will use this grant to develop a curriculum designed to enhance residents’ capacity to address the social determinants of health.
The Picker Gold Graduate Medical Education Challenge Grant Program supports the research and development of successful patient-centered care initiatives and best practices in the education of our country’s physicians. Each Picker Gold award of up to $25,000 is matched by equal funding from the researchers’ medical institution.
“The Picker-Gold Challenge Grants facilitate the application, evaluation, and dissemination of innovative programs that nurture patient-centered and culturally humble care delivery,” said Elizabeth Cleek, PsyD, Gold Foundation Chief Operating Officer. “Each of these programs expand current training opportunities to enhance patient care.”
Dr. Ashley Fernandes
Using a Team-Based Learning Curricula to Teach and Assess Patient-Centered, Humanistic Ethics for Pediatric Residents and Health Professionals
Bioethics graduate medical education is essential in transforming the culture of medicine. Ethics education communicates the doctor’s professional core values through knowledge and practice, creating a culture of humanism within the practice of medicine. Dr. Ashley Fernandes and his colleagues at Nationwide Children’s Hospital will refine and expand their institution’s current Team-Based Learning (TBL) pediatric resident bioethics curricula, adapting it to include interprofessional collaboration, and equip and train faculty at other pediatric GME programs to create and execute TBL ethics modules.
They already have training commitments from two pediatric residency programs and will present their proposal and curricula at the UNESCO World Conference in Bioethics to an international audience in Portugal in May 2020. They aim to promote patient-centered, humanistic medicine through curricula that will help to create a new generation of ethical and humanistic pediatricians who always put the patient and family first and are intentional in integrating empathetic communication into every encounter.
Development and Implementation of a Longitudinal Community Engagement Curriculum to Enhance Residents’ Capacity to Address the Social Determinants of Health
Dr. Raquel Greer
Enhancing health care professionals’ understanding of the social determinants of health and their ability to address them in and with the communities they serve is essential to creating a health care workforce that is prepared to effectively, efficiently, and compassionately meet the health care needs of populations with diverse ethnic/racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, cultural values, behaviors, and resources. The Johns Hopkins Team led by Dr. Greer will pilot a longitudinal community engagement curriculum in four programs across three departments, the Medicine-Pediatrics Urban Health Residency, Internal Medicine Urban Health Primary Care Residency, Pediatric Residency Program Health Equity Track, and the General Surgery Training Program (n=49 residents total). The overall goal of the curriculum is to enhance:
- residents’ understanding of the social determinants of health and of how health care, public health, and other community sectors can effectively partner together to reduce socioeconomic and ethnic/race disparities in health and health care, and
- residents’ capacity to integrate patients’ social needs into care.
Through the proposed curriculum, the team aims to enhance future physicians’ capacity to effectively and compassionately meet the health care needs of vulnerable populations locally and nationally.
The curriculum will be developed as part of a collaborative partnership between: 1) the Johns Hopkins Brancati Center for the Advancement of Community Care, 2) the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, 3) Medicine for the Greater Good, 4) the Johns Hopkins Office of Graduate Medical Education, 5) SOURCE and 6) the pilot residency programs.
