Community engagement

Attending the UCLA Summit over the weekend was a wonderful reminder of the incredible impact that academic medical centers can make in their local communities and sparked new ideas for strengthening our own community efforts in the Pacific Northwest.

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A View from the Chair

Last week I made a quick trip down to Los Angeles with Bessie Young, our Vice Dean of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the UW Medicine Office of Healthcare Equity. We attended the second annual Los Angeles Summit together which highlighted a number of collaborations between community organizations and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Medicine (DOM).

screenshot of slide from the LA Summit and a image of attendees in front of a slide on a monitor in the background.

The speakers were inspiring, and the results of this work were impressive with one example of a street medicine program leading to clear reductions in ER visits and hospitalizations with better control of chronic disease in the communities that were served.

These partnerships gave us a multitude of ideas for community engagement that we can pursue here in the Pacific Northwest. In the upcoming months, we will be working with our UW Medicine ambulatory leadership and strategy team to explore potential partnerships in our local King County community. For example, there could be significant benefits in strengthening our relationships with local federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), and I look forward to seeing what is possible!

The conference was a wonderful reminder of the incredible impact that academic medical centers can make in their local communities and builds on our partnership with UCLA and other academic medical centers, with whom we recently collaborated to submit a letter of intent for a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation “Connecting Champions for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in the Health Professions” 2-million-dollar grant. On my end it was also heartwarming to see old colleagues and friends.

bike and helmut P.S. My husband is an avid cyclist and has enjoyed the PNW summer and the Burke-Gilman trail. For my recent birthday, he bought me a new bike. I initially protested because well, I have not ridden a bike in multiple decades!

He quickly said "it is like riding a bike!" and I did not really have a good answer for that so we took the bike to an empty parking lot and like a kid, made sure that I could ride the bike without falling.

Then this weekend we went for a 12-mile bike ride and I'm happy to report that there was no head trauma and no broken limbs which I consider a success! The fall here is so pretty!