Innovative Project To Immerse Residents In The Community

Dr. John Lammie talks about plans for the Community Centered Practice Project with a resident.

By immersing residents in the nearby Colonial Heights community and building strong neighborhood ties, the Community Centered Practice Project looks to enhance the care provided for a medically underserved minority population and the ability of young physicians to understand and educate these patients. Didactic instruction and participation in service-learning activities, such as health fairs and after-school tutoring sessions, will also play an integral part in the residents’ education process.

In preparation, the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine has already established working relationships with a public high school, C.A. Johnson Preparatory Academy; a church with a strong outreach program, Family Worship Center; and neighborhood associations within Colonial Heights. “One of the first things community leaders told us about was significant trust issues. They had many problems in the past with groups coming in with big ideas that were never carried out,” said Dr. John Lammie, Project Director and Director of The Family Medicine Residency Program. “We need to make small, but faithful steps and follow through on what we say we are going to do,” he added.

Residents’ involvement will range from teaching health and science lessons at C.A. Johnson to collaborating with teens to address local needs through service projects. Over the course of their three-year residency they will be able to become mentors for the teens. “We want to show the residents right from the start that as health care providers they can make a difference. My dream is that high school students will also see that they can make a difference, and that they can aspire to become health care professionals in the community they grew up in,” said Dr. Lammie.

Plans are also underway for each resident to be matched with a family of a high school student through an “adopt-a-resident” program. Through the adoption process, the resident will serve the family as a primary care practitioner while the family will provide a hospitable link to the neighborhood. “By being included in the culture and life of the neighborhood, our residents will gain a knowledge of the community and a sense of ownership. It will give a greater degree of intimacy to the doctor/ and doctor/community relationships,” said Dr. Lammie.

One of the goals of the project is to develop cultural competence in the residents so they can understand ethnic and racial barriers that can impede the delivery of quality health care. Building familiarity and trust with Colonial Heights teens, for example, will assist residents in addressing the particular healthcare and social issues commonly faced by adolescents in the low-income neighborhood, including teen pregnancy and childcare, obesity in combination with inadequate nutrition, and single-parent homes.

Residents will also have the opportunity to develop and sharpen community health assessment, health informatics and health education skills. The patient education center within the new Family Practice Center will provide them with an additional option for patient teaching. Patients can receive individual or small group instruction on particular disease processes through the wealth of information on the Internet and instructional CDs.

With the project slated to get underway in July, Dr. Lammie is not only impassioned about the plans, but also excited about the possibilities. Looking five to ten years down the road, he hopes the USC School of Medicine can make an impact on the health disparities that can plague minority populations like those in Colonial Heights. " I would love to see these partnerships expand and grow into a much bigger coalition of community partners. With the resources of both the medical school and the community we could be a beacon, a real center of excellence for the study and elimination of health disparities in this state," he said.

Reprinted from Connections newsletter, April 2003

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