On February 4 the Graduate Council met and approved a proposal for a new emphasis in Academic Family Medicine. This emphasis is a collaboration between the College of Public Health’s Department of Health Services Research & Administration (HSRA) and the College of Medicine’s Department of Family Medicine.
The purpose of this new emphasis is to combine knowledge from academic medicine and public health. Graduates will become researchers, policy makers, administrators, and educators able to build primary care infrastructure required for effectively managing chronic illness, treating infectious diseases, and guaranteeing access to quality health care.
This area builds upon UNMC’s reputation as a leader in primary care/family medicine, and UNMC’s longstanding relationships with China. The Chinese government has made it a goal to improve its primary care system by the year 2020. UNMC has taken a number of steps to help with this goal, including offering education and training at annual Family Medicine Symposia in Shanghai and Xi’an, as well as hosting an annual Family Medicine Leadership Seminar on UNMC’s campus.
The new emphasis on Academic Family Medicine is the latest step. Jeffrey Harrison, M.D., from the Department of Family Medicine at UNMC, says that this new emphasis fills "China’s need to develop family medicine leaders to implement the training of physicians." Li-Wu Chen, Ph.D., from the Department of Health Services Research and Administration says that "this new emphasis will provide Chinese future academic leaders with solid training in family medicine and health services and policy research, so that they can better address their country’s challenges for building a strong primary health care system."
Though the emphasis has just been approved, a number of people have expressed interest in it. One student was provisionally admitted to it last year. This student, Yangyuna Yang, said that the emphasis "provides us not only health services research skills, but also exposure to academic family medicine, especially medical teaching and training, clinical practice and service quality improvement, etc. To sum up, all the training essentials that we will get in this track will be extremely useful to help us to contribute to our reconstruction of primary care system and medical education system in China once we graduate from it."
This emphasis will train people for a number of jobs. "I would like to become a health services administrator with an emphasis in primary care service, who can build up training courses, medical service delivery systems, and quality improvement processes. I would also like to be a medical teaching faculty in a medical school focused on family medicine or primary care," Yangyuna says.
For more information on the new emphasis, including how to apply, please see the Asia Pacific Rim Development Program’s website.