Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
Electronic Communications: Websites - Gold
For Penn Medicine, service to community is deeply integrated into our medical education, clinical care, and biomedical research missions. Our multimedia website Service in Action is where we tell the stories of those community health needs and the ongoing effort to address long-standing inequities in health. Our goals through this storytelling are both to raise public and community awareness of the issues and of Penn Medicine’s involvement in solutions and to engage and inspire our own employees and students to continue to push forward in making a difference for community health in their own ways.
What is one thing you learned from your entry/experience?
We were already telling many of these stories elsewhere — across our own institutional sites and social media platforms and in the news media. We found value in aggregating those stories in a shared hub with our report’s original storytelling.
What challenge did you overcome?
Including the voices of people who are directly affected by an issue, many of whom are from marginalized backgrounds, is an ongoing challenge. Sometimes it is a matter of creativity, and sometimes sheer persistence — such as the time we had to keep calling an undocumented patient, via a translation service, to verify his consent to share his story.
Contact:
Julie Wood
julie.wood@pennmedicine.upenn.edu