The gap has been there for years and everyone knows it needs bridging. So say David Wood, M.D., M.P.H, and William Livingood, Ph.D., both faculty members in the College of Medicine-Jacksonville at Shands Jacksonville.
 
"We’ve always had this schism between public health and medical education," said Wood, an associate professor of pediatrics. "Some people cross over and do both — but, believe me, you’re in two different worlds when you go from medicine to public health, and it just shouldn’t be that way."

Thanks to a new grant from the American Association of Medical Colleges funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, these two worlds can merge.

The $25,000 grant — one of only 13 awarded nationwide — is earmarked to establish and sustain the Regional Medical-Public Health Education Center at Jacksonville and boost the longtime collaborative resources, experience and history between the college and the health department.

"Medicine needs to think more in terms of population health and prevention and really integrate that into everything we do, and that’s the whole point of this grant," Wood said. "We also need to turn physicians on to public health as a potential career path because there’s a huge deficit of physicians going into that field."

The goal is twofold — to integrate population-health thinking into the medical resident experience and to expand population and public health training to all internal medicine and emergency medicine residents in Jacksonville.

Until now, only the UF pediatric and medicine residency programs in Jacksonville have partnered with the health department for resident service-based learning and scholarship opportunities and for faculty development activities.

"First, we’ll create an administrative structure — one that is both interdisciplinary and representative of the Duval County Health Department and the College of Medicine-Jacksonville — to oversee the program," said Livingood, an assistant professor of pediatrics who also serves as director of the Duval County Health Department’s Institute for Health Planning and Evaluation Research. "Then, within this structure we’ll provide experiential learning in a wide array of population and preventive health content to all residents in internal medicine and emergency medicine."
 
The plan is to extend the model developed in pediatrics to the internal medicine and emergency medicine residency programs. "We’ll be able to integrate population/public health and preventive health content into core didactic conferences in (internal medicine) and (emergency medicine), including grand rounds, noon conferences, ward rounds, morning report and other didactic educational opportunities," Livingood said.
 
The program’s key objectives and tasks will be measured using agreed-upon outcomes as targets and reported to the CDC and AAMC at the end of the one-year grant period.
 
Wood and Livingood will serve as committee co-chairs, overseeing the program’s initiatives. Committee members also include the senior associate dean for educational affairs, College of Medicine-Jacksonville residency directors for internal medicine and emergency medicine and the Duval County Health Department director.
 
One of the educational opportunities the committee will implement is a full-day symposium to expose residents to existing projects in population and public health that they could join for a longitudinal experiential learning project. Residents’ learning goals will be matched with specific projects and mentors. They also will be expected to produce and present meaningful and/or scholarly work from their projects in an academic forum.
 
The goal is to change the residents’ thinking.
 
"When they think of a clinical issue we hope they’ll think beyond diagnosis and treatment and think about the community implications, like what’s causing it, the community factors contributing to it and how to prevent the problems from occurring in the first place," Wood said. "We hope they’ll get excited about public health as they go out into their careers — even as clinical physicians — and be willing to participate in their community, address the population and public health issues and see the bigger picture."

Photo cutline:
Merging the very different worlds of medicine and public health is the goal of a new American Association of Medical Colleges grant awarded to the College of Medicine-Jacksonville. The grant allows UF faculty members William Livingood, Ph.D., (left) and David Wood, M.D., Ph.D., (right) to collaborate with Duval County Health Department director Robert Harmon, M.D., to establish and sustain the Regional Medical-Public Health Education Center at Jacksonville. (Photo by Nelson Keefer)