Our community medicine program reflects UPMC St. Margaret's strong commitment to community health care and community service. Community medicine educational experiences are integrated into both the family medicine residency and fellowship programs.
UPMC St. Margaret's community medicine program is multifaceted. Major components of this program include a first-year outpatient health center rotation and a longitudinal community medicine project for second and third-year residents. During the first year rotation, residents will be introduced to the special challenges of community health care via a home visitation program, indigent community health centers, and our school health partnership program, as well as exposure to patient/community education principles. Our residents work within a highly collaborative multidisciplinary team composed of pharmacists, social workers, a psychiatrist, and dedicated nursing staff, to provide patient-centered care that is mindful of larger community health problems that affect their families. Community needs assessment projects to help direct quality improvement projects, including our naloxone distribution and Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) programs. On-site primary care treatment of Hepatitis C is also an important intervention recently led by one of our senior residents as part of his Community Medicine project. We have recently initiated a Population Health program that enables our residents to utilize clinical data to identify opportunities to improve health and outcome measures in our patient panels, and in the community at large.
It is our hope that through training in COPC (Community Oriented Primary Care) principles and developing strong one-on-one relationships with patients through community-based activities, residents will gain an understanding of the socioeconomic, cultural, and family dynamics which characterize our community of patients. By understanding the individual in the context of family and community, the physician can employ more appropriate strategies to alter health behaviors.
