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AAMC Press Room
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Embargoed for Release 7:00 p.m., EST, Oct. 23, 1999

Morehouse School of Medicine Receives AAMC Outstanding Community Service Award

Washington, D.C., October 23, 1999 -- First-year medical students at the Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) learn first-hand how to analyze the health problems of a defined community in the inner-city neighborhoods of Atlanta. For MSM, community service is the principal mission-to recruit and train minority and other students as physicians, biomedical scientists, and public health practitioners committed to meeting the primary health care needs of the underserved. In recognition of this commitment, MSM received the 1999 AAMC Outstanding Community Service Award today at the Association's 110th annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

"The purpose of this award is to recognize the vitally important services medical schools and teaching hospitals provide to communities across the country," said AAMC President Jordan J. Cohen, M.D. "We honor Morehouse for the significant difference it has made each year to 25,000 disadvantaged Georgians through its teaching, research, and service programs."

Morehouse School of Medicine's community service philosophy is based on empowerment and partnership. In the early 1990s, the school pioneered and published Community Organization and Development for Health Promotion, a process for establishing a community coalition that develops and implements health promotion interventions in collaboration with the medical school. MSM has helped to build more than 40 successful community coalitions in Georgia using this method, empowering them to mount projects and work for change after the medical school has withdrawn.

"Community service at Morehouse is not a peripheral function; it is central to the pursuit of our mission," said E. Nigel Harris, M.D., dean and senior vice president for Academic Affairs.

One example of MSM's effort to incorporate community service into the medical school curriculum is a required eight-week Family Medicine/Maternal Child Health Clerkship that not only introduces the student to clinical issues, but also involves the student in community outreach, requiring each student to design a program that addresses a community problem such as drugs or poor diet. The Pediatrics clerkship upholds the same principles, assigning each student to work with a community agency. Ambulatory clinics are located in underserved areas. Other examples of MSM's efforts to provide highly valued health care services to inner-city Atlanta and rural Georgia include:

• Morehouse has recently added a Prevention Research Center, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to its community service portfolio. The center focuses on a group of nine low-income, predominantly African American neighborhoods, and is guided by a community coalition board run primarily by community residents. The center's first project will develop and test an intervention program to prevent the spread of HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among women.
  
• Over the past nine years, at least half a dozen Community-based Cancer Prevention and Control Projects have investigated approaches to increasing the number of inner-city and rural African American women who receive mammograms and Pap smears, while another major project has explored ways to heighten cancer awareness among African Americans. These efforts have led to hundreds of women receiving mammograms and Pap smears, while others have quit smoking and improved their eating habits.
  
• Conducted in partnership with the Fulton County Health Department, the Community-Based Teaching Health Department seeks to create an effective affiliation between the medical school and the health department. Teaching activities include practicum opportunities for preventive medicine and public health students, elective opportunities, and research projects such as a test of an intervention to prevent STDs and AIDS in a public housing project near MSM's campus.
  
• Project Right Choices, a joint effort of Morehouse and the Clay County Improvement Association (a community coalition established with HPRC assistance), gives 100 fourth through sixth graders a place to go on weekends and when school lets out. The program focuses on pregnancy prevention through abstinence, on issues of self-esteem and on anger management. In Atlanta, a mentoring program for teen parents seeks to prevent second pregnancies, while the Three Tier Peer Program offers an intervention at a middle school directed at reducing both teen pregnancies and STDs. MSM also runs teen clinics-one in a health department facility and another in a children's hospital-which offer comprehensive adolescent care, counseling and contraceptive services.
  
• Other MSM initiatives include a Gerontology Center which provides technical assistance in establishing support services in senior citizen high rise housing as well as educational offerings for seniors, medical back-up for a clinic for homeless women and children, and a cardiology outreach program which provides educational sessions on heart disease prevention to community groups. In addition, Morehouse's Partnerships for Health Professions Education program fulfills the school's commitment to enlarge the pool of minority applicants to medical and other health professions schools through an array of minority recruitment and retention projects beginning in elementary school and continuing throughout the educational continuum.

Morehouse is the seventh recipient of the AAMC's outstanding Community Service Award. Previous winners include the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1993, University of Medicine and Dentistry-New Jersey Medical School in 1994, Boston University School of Medicine in 1995, Montefiore Medical Center in 1996, Wright State University School of Medicine in 1997, and UCLA with Drew University in 1998.

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The Association of American Medical Colleges represents the 125 accredited U.S. medical schools; the 16 accredited Canadian medical schools; some 400 major teaching hospitals, including 74 Veterans Administration medical centers; 91 academic and professional societies representing nearly 88,000 faculty members; and the nation's 67,000 medical students and 102,000 residents.

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