Welcome!
The Department of Family Medicine and Community Health of the University of Pennsylvania has a proud and rich mix of academics and service. Begun in 1996, the Department has quickly developed excellent residency, fellowship, medical student education, patient care, research, and community service programs. Our faculty are also helping to lead a major new program, the Center for Public Health Initiatives,involving schools across the University of Pennsylvania campus. Explore our site and consider visiting, joining, or supporting us!
We are located on Penn’s unique campus which encourages interaction between departments and schools – all within a few block radius in a dedicated campus, and two of the major hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) diagonally across campus -- Penn-Presbyterian Medical Center (PPMC) and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP).
Our Penn Family Care office has two sites: Mutch Building on the PPMC Campus, and St. Leonard’s Court about 2 blocks away in West Philadelphia. We see about 45,000 outpatient visits a year and have about 1,000 hospital admissions, admitting the adults mostly to PPMC and about 400 mothers and their babies a year at HUP. We provide the full range of family medicine services, and our offices serve as the Medical Home to many patients. Department faculty participate in the Palliative Care Consultation Service and are lead physicians for Penn’s Wissahickon Hospice (Dr. Joseph Straton, Chief Medical Officer and Dr. Peter Cronholm, Medical Director). In addition to the recent opening of a 12-bed inpatient unit Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse, Insert link Wissahickon Hospice serves approximately 250 Hospice patients in their homes or in long-term care communities daily.
Our residency has 18 residents learning and exploring family medicine with our faculty. Our program is known for the academic rigor it brings to curricular emphases on community medicine, women’s health, and elective research experiences. Residents rotate through PPMC, HUP, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which is geographically adjacent to HUP, various UPHS practices and community sites. Our sports medicine fellowship program trains fellows in sites across the health system and region, including the Philadelphia Eagles training rooms.
Our academic fellowship is among the best in the country for creating our next family medicine leaders and researchers; it is a 2-3 year program that includes a masters degree, leadership and educational seminars, and intense mentoring on a project of the fellow’s choosing. Our fellows are highly sought after in academic family medicine departments locally and nationally. Our medical student programs include a required ambulatory clerkship in the clinical year with clinical experiences at our offices or various community offices, and a number of popular electives. Our faculty also lead or teach in other core medical student courses, such as the Doctor-Patient Relationship course, Doctoring, and Physical Diagnosis.
Our research encompasses broad ranges of topics that are central for improving health and primary care delivery. We have four primary areas of initiatives, including mental health in primary care and communities, reducing cancer and symptom burden in communities, public and community health, and integrative medicine. We also have faculty with interest and research in literacy, at-risk families, prevention of prematurity and infant morbidity, women’s health and intimate partner violence, men and violence, behavioral and lifestyle change, mental health and chronic disease, Asian-American health, health communication, cancer prevention, and acupuncture
The Section of Public Health is a new entity in 2007 that reinforces our public and community health academics and service. The section leads our ties with the University-wide Center for Public Health Initiatives, Masters of Public Health Program, and other public health initiatives. Our efforts in public health have greatly strengthened our work in communities, with a major focus on partnering with organizations in urban Philadelphia neighborhoods. We have many community links, which continually expand, with all of our education, clinical and research programs. We have a particularly strong link with a broad partnership program at the Sayre High School in West Philadelphia. Along with the Netter Center for Community Partnership of the University of Pennsylvania, the School of Nursing, The School of Social Policy and Practice, and the School of Dentistry, and our school partners, there is the unique Sayre Health Clinic, a student-based Federally Qualified Community Health Center, as well as many other community and student programs. Several of our faculty provide prenatal care at local Federally Qualified Community Health Centers, and those babies are delivered by our faculty and residents at HUP. A more complete listing is found at the community health portion of our website ( link) and the Center for Public Health Initiatives website ( link).
Globally, our largest program is the Guatemalan Health Initiative, where we partner with Hospitalito Atitlán to improve health in the Tz’utujil Maya town of Santiago Atitlán. (http://www.med.upenn.edu/ghi/). Our faculty also directs an innovative national program to train medical students acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing, China.(Link) There are also several cross-national research projects, such as the work about depression in primary care in Mexico, and we regularly have visitors from other countries.
The department is innovative, academically strong, and community oriented. We are proud to exemplify the Penn Compact – initiated by our current President, Dr. Amy Gutmann. INCREASING ACCESS, INTEGRATING KNOWLEDGE, and ENGAGING LOCALLY and GLOBALLY.
http://www.upenn.edu/compact/
For the health of all peoples
Marjorie A. Bowman, MD, MPA
Professor and Chair
