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Where you live in a particular U.S. city determines your predicted life expectancy. Neighborhood is destiny, in a way. For example, in New Orleans, there is a twenty-five-year difference in life expectancy from one parish to another only three miles away. This pattern of great gaps in health status, even over short distances, repeats itself in New York, Chicago, the Bay Area, and many other American cities, with harsh consequences.
In 2005, Tulsa, Oklahoma was one of the first cities to recognize such dramatic neighborhood variations in life expectancy, with a fourteen-year difference in life expectancy between north Tulsa and midtown—and to take action. In this presentation, Dr. Gerard Clancy describes specific initiatives and lessons learned on the ten-year journey, from 2005 to 2015, to reverse these health disparities and improve the health of the people in north Tulsa. The successes of the past decade have inspired a new ten-year initiative in Tulsa focused on mental health system improvements.
Co-presented with the Brodie Medical Education Award Committee, the Academy of Distinguished Educators, and the Department of Medicine
Many personal, social, organizational, and regulatory factors in health care today contribute to clinicians experiencing burnout, a chronic stress syndrome characterized by exhaustion, depersonalization, and feelings of inadequacy. When severe, these symptoms are often accompanied and exacerbated by depression—and sometimes lead to suicide. In this combined Medical Center Hour and Medical Grand Rounds, Dean Gianakos MD FACP will not teach techniques to fortify personal resilience in the face of incipient burnout or offer strategies to reduce the inefficiencies of practice. Rather, using poems and stories, he will open a dialogue on how health professionals can emotionally support one another, initiate crucial conversations, and reduce the isolation that too often characterizes medical practice.
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine, UVA
Aaron Eichorst shares his experiences growing up as a Mennonite and his complicated relationship with the Mennonite Church after coming out. He discusses the gay community in Charlottesville and several gay bars that are now closed, including the Silver Fox, Club 216, and Escafe. Aaron also describes his experiences as an art teacher and deciding when and how to be out with his coworkers and students.
In the spotlight for years now, health care that is truly equitable and patient-centered and delivered by a diverse, well-integrated team remains a goal—in most sites, it's not yet everyday reality. Individuals and institutions—including health professional schools as well as centers of clinical practice—continue to work toward this goal. But this effort cannot depend just on recruiting more diverse learners, reorganizing clinical environments, or deploying didactics aimed at eliminating biased attitudes and behaviors. Rather, it’s a matter of redesigning health professional education—curriculum, assessment strategies, learning environments—to prepare a thoroughly diverse workforce ready to counter health disparities. To actually realize diversity’s benefits, we must eschew a colorblind philosophy and embrace principles of equity pedagogy.
In this Medical Center Hour, Dr. Catherine Lucey explores equity pedagogy and how it may help to counter the structural racism and inequitable learning environments of traditional medical school. Such a fundamental change in our pedagogy may be necessary to improve health outcomes for patients of all cultures, colors, creeds, and means and, along the way, establish work environments where clinicians, teachers, and scientists of many backgrounds and professional preparations can all flourish.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture / Medical Education Grand Rounds
Co-presented with the Office of Medical Education
Lucy Kalanithi is many things. Physician. Professor. Writer, and speaker. Mother. Widow. She was married for nine years to Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, the illness that claimed his life in 2015 at age thirty-seven. As he struggled, suffered, and worried, Paul wrote. His memoir—When Breath Becomes Air, for which Lucy wrote the epilogue—became a bestseller after it was published in 2016.
In this Medical Center Hour, which is also the School of Nursing's annual Bice Memorial Lecture, Dr. Lucy Kalanithi talks with UVA Nursing Professor Ken White about the Kalanithis' challenging journey to the end of Paul's life and how Paul and Lucy did not avoid suffering but, rather, leaned into it and created meaning from it.
The Zula Mae Baber Bice Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the School of Nursing
Nalini Nadkarni is known as "The Queen of the Rainforest Canopy," being a pioneer in the field of forest canopy research and in public engagement about the plants and animals that live in the treetops. Her interest in rainforest dynamics and in the response of rainforests to disturbances such as harvesting, fire, and climate change has led her to invite input from experts in diverse other fields that also study disruption and recovery--economics, neuroscience, refugee studies, human development, and traffic engineering, to name a few. Exchanges with these experts have given Professor Nadkarni novel insights into theory and models that foster better understanding of disturbance, recovery, and resilience.
Unexpectedly, in 2015, this work also proved personally useful as Professor Nadkarni recovered from extensive trauma sustained when she fell 50 feet from the top of a tree while doing forest canopy fieldwork. In this Medical Center Hour/Medical Grand Rounds, she shares her insights and offers applications for medicine--especially, to the specifics of critical care, and, more generally, to healing.
Medical Grand Rounds / A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine
Alan Cohn and Joe Montoya are a gay couple - one of the first to be legally married in Charlottesville in 2014. They discuss how they met and how they each grew into their identities. They moved to Charlottesville in 1991 for professional opportunities, and they describe their experiences with the Charlottesville queer community. They discuss the process of having a child via surrogate and the legal complications around custody, including the decision to get married as soon as it became legal.
