Volume 14
Issue 5
June 2015
SYSTEMnews CEO’s corner RALPH W. MULLER
CEO, University of Pennsylvania Health System
This is a special time in the long history of one of the world’s great medical institutions. As the Penn family commemorates 250 years of the nation’s first medical school, it is also an occasion to reflect on our even more wide-ranging commitment to strengthening lives and communities. Throughout the year, our faculty, staff and students volunteer their time and skills in hundreds of outreach efforts. These include services that we provide directly as well as support through Penn Medicine CAREs, our internal grant-making program. Recognizing that there is strength in numbers, we have formed partnerships with many organizations and members of our community. In all cases, the aim is the same: improving the lives of those who need us most. Providing health care to the city’s poor and underserved has been a core value since Penn’s medical school was established. From treating victims of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic to providing free care to patients at the Philadelphia General Hospital till it closed in 1977, Penn’s medical faculty and students have a long history of reaching out. (Read more about our service history in this issue’s main story.)
the MANY FACES OF
It’s been 250 years since the University of Pennsylvania established the first medical school in what would become the United States. Not long after the first graduates earned their diplomas, the American Revolution drew Penn medical faculty and alumni into the fray. Ever since then, Penn physicians, medical students and eventually nurses, too, have taken their healing arts beyond campus borders, caring for the community, serving their country, and striving to improve health care around the world. Yellow fever and cholera — words Philadelphians dreaded to hear. The 1793 yellow fever epidemic claimed 10 percent of the city’s population. Penn physicians, including Benjamin Rush, and several trainees did their best to treat the afflicted populace with the limited remedies of the times; some of these selfless volunteers died in the process. In 1841, Penn established the first of many outpatient clinics — dispensaries as they were called then — to make health care accessible to the community. When the University relocated from its Ninth Street location to West Philadelphia in the early 1870s, it built a hospital (HUP) with 50 free beds for the city’s poor. In HUP’s backyard, Penn physicians would treat patients at Philadelphia General Hospital gratis until the facility’s doors closed in 1977.
It is, of course, impossible to discuss every or even most of our current outreach efforts in this column. What follows therefore is a sampling of the range of caring taking place throughout the Health System and in community halls, church basements, and neighborhood-based school settings. The Penn Medicine Pipeline Program enables high school juniors and seniors to take for-credit college courses tuition-free at Community College of Philadelphia while completing paid internships throughout the Health System. Students also learn interpersonal and interview skills and résumé writing, which prepares them both for the college application process and whatever careers they ultimately choose. The benefits are clear: 100 percent of last year’s Pipeline graduates completed high school versus 64 percent in the city’s school district.
INSIDE
Newsmakers..............................4 Researchers Win Award for HIV Breakthrough................5 Health Empowerment Partnerships...............................5 A New Home Base for Puentes de Salud......................5 Cappola Named Head of Cardiovascular Medicine..........6 Awards & Accolades.................6
By the mid-20th century, Penn medical students took a leadership role in community outreach, establishing clinics for the homeless in center city and underprivileged communities in North and West Philadelphia. They also participated in anti-drug and anti-smoking workshops for teenagers, created programs to expose Philadelphia high school students to higher education, and volunteered with Special Olympics. Faculty-led projects have brought healthcare services to migrant farm workers in rural sections of Chester County and to South Philadelphia’s Latino community. In addition to volunteering in neighborhood clinics, today’s medical students are providing health screenings and promoting health education at science carnivals and other community events. Penn researchers and clinicians are getting around the city in mobile units working toward HIV/AIDS prevention.
Penn medical faculty, students, and alumni have served this nation in every major military conflict since colonial militias and British Army regulars exchanged shots at Lexington and Concord. Service has ranged from field teams treating the wounded on battlefields to physicians staffing hospitals on land and at sea, from innovators developing new technologies to highly positioned administrators working behind the scenes to advance medical care for the war effort.
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Penn Medicine@Work..............3
The wave of immigrants arriving in late-19th-century Philadelphia stepped up the need for health care in expanding neighborhoods. In South Philadelphia, Penn obstetrician Barton Cooke Hirst established the Southeastern Dispensary, staffed by physicians and medical students who made house calls and provided free obstetrical and gynecological health care. In the 1920s, orthopaedic surgeon Arthur Bruce Gill opened a clinic in northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal region and brought crippled children needing surgery to HUP.
Healing on the Battlefields
The Sayre-Penn Partnership, based at William L. Sayre High School and the federally qualified Sayre Health Center, features high-quality health care supplied by Penn physicians, residents and medical students who teach science and health topics to Sayre students,
Lancaster General Health to Join UPHS.............................2
SERVICE
`` Mother and newborn in the Southeastern Dispensary in 1920, which cared for more than 1,000 patients each year. Students made house calls as well.
During the American Revolution, Penn medical faculty and at least 40 medical alumni, including all but one member of the Class of 1768, supported American troops fighting for independence. John Morgan, the medical school’s founder, and William Shippen Jr., the school’s first anatomy professor, successively served as director general of hospitals for the Continental Army. (continued on page 2) `` William Fisher Norris (top, center), and his medical staff at Douglas Hospital in Washington, DC in 1864. He helped pioneer the use of microphotography to record wounds and specimens. After the war, he developed Penn’s Department of Ophthalmology.
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