2019 PAFP AWARD WINNERS CELEBRATING EXCELLENCE IN FAMILY MEDICINE For more, visit: www.pafp.com
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Public Health Award Winner
ELIZABETH GEORGE, MD IN HER OWN WORDS
ELIZABETH GEORGE, MD, WINNER OF THE INAUGURAL PUBLIC HEALTH AWARD, SPOKE WITH KEYSTONE PHYSICIAN ABOUT HOW SHE BECAME INTERESTED IN PUBLIC HEALTH AND WHAT A SUCCESSFUL INTERVENTION LOOKS LIKE. did all of the clinical rotations and I loved them all, but when I got to my family practice rotation it made the most sense, to put everything together. There wasn’t any way I was going to do just body parts or system parts or anything. That’s kind of why I went into medicine, also – I had done some microbiology research in the lab, and I didn’t keep doing it because I wanted to take care of the person part of it rather than some DNA or RNA. The wellness aspect [of family medicine] was always part of our modus operandi. We always emphasized a healthy lifestyle. Around 2010, the statistic came out from the CDC that the current generation is going to live less long from our generation, and I thought, we are just not making progress in this. I was looking at the statistics and there were towns and states with much better statistics than ours, so I started speaking to the community and saying “What’s going on with our community, and why are other 26
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KEYSTONE PHYSICIAN
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SUMMER 2019
communities healthier than ours?” That’s what had us start looking at the structure, the builtin environment that has people being active or eating healthy, the opportunities. And there was lots of research showing that the community you grew up in made a big difference in your health choices. It takes a long time to change, for example, infrastructure. It’s going to be a long time till we get side paths and bike lanes on the road. You feel like those are going to be big achievements! But the one that’s flying highest every time we do it, you can tell it’s just making a big difference, is the Healthy Eating Adventure [Editor’s note: a six-week-long public health intervention to get Franklin County residents to choose healthier eating options]. People so instantly, within a week and then by the end of the month, feel so much better. And they know that their health is better and there are obvious measures of better health from eating that way, but I can immedi-