The Arnold P. Gold Foundation Board Chair Richard C. Sheerr has announced a new appointee to the Board of Trustees: Dr. Patricia S. Sexton, Associate Dean for Curriculum and Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at A.T. Still University, Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine (KCOM).
“We are delighted to welcome Dr. Sexton to the Board of Trustees at the Gold Foundation,” said Mr. Sheerr. “Dr. Sexton brings a deep understanding of communications and ethics, cultural humility and patient safety, osteopathic medical education and research, and many more issues critical to humanistic care. We look forward to her insights as we pursue the mission of ensuring humanistic healthcare for all.”
Dr. Sexton joined the Trustees in June as Chair-Elect of the Gold Humanism Honor Society (GHHS) Advisory Council, a position that automatically confers a seat on the Board. She has been the GHHS Advisor for the KCOM chapter for 10 years and has also served on the GHHS Advisory Council and Executive Committee. She became a GHHS member in 2010, when she was awarded the Gold Foundation’s Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award.
The Gold Foundation is a nonprofit organization that champions humanism in healthcare. For more than 30 years, the foundation has worked to foster compassionate, collaborative, scientifically excellent care by engaging medical schools, health systems, companies and individual clinicians around the world. The foundation created the now iconic White Coat Ceremony, which marks the start of training by emphasizing the importance of humanistic care, and the Gold Humanism Honor Society, which has more than 50,000 members who have been peer-nominated for their compassionate patient care.
“I am humbled and extremely honored to have the opportunity to serve on the Gold Foundation Board,” said Dr. Sexton. “I hold the work done by the foundation to be of critical importance in our fractured world. There has never been more need for collaborative, compassionate, scientifically excellent care for all. I look forward to learning from Gold leadership and serving to the greatest extent of my capacity.”
Dr. Sexton has over 30 years of experience in osteopathic medical education and research. She teaches in the areas of communication skills, bioethics, research ethics, health disparities, cultural humility, professional identity formation, patient safety, healthcare systems, and end-of-life issues.
A long-time advocate of transformative learning in osteopathic medical education, Dr. Sexton has developed a myriad of elective course offering in medical humanities to enrich osteopathic medical students’ orientation to the patient condition. With the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM), she has served nationally as Chair of the Society of Osteopathic Medical Educators (SOME), as well as on the Professionalism and Ethics Task Force, the Project on Empathy in Medical Education, the EPAs working group, and many other groups. She is membership chair for the Academy for Professionalism in Healthcare.
Dr. Sexton was recently presented with the Missouri Association of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons Medallion Award. She is the founder and a fellow of the National Academy of Osteopathic Medical Educators. She has also served as a consultant for the Association for Korean Medicine and the Armed Forces College of Medicine, Egypt, in collaboration with Michigan State University Institute for Global Health.
