Family & Community Medicine
Established in 1974, the Department of Family and Community Medicine was founded on the belief that all people should have access to physicians trained to diagnose and manage the wide range of medical problems found in primary care settings.
We believe that “health” is a holistic state of well-being and our team is dedicated to helping individuals, families, and communities achieve health through our efforts in providing patient care services, education, and research.
To this end, our department is committed to a broad range of training experiences that provide the ability to function effectively in underserved settings. Guided by the Patient Centered Medical Home Model, our faculty, staff, and residents have a responsibility to maintain medical, educational, and administrative excellence in all of their activities, including leadership development through scholarship, presentation, and publication.
Over the years, we merged with the Divisions of Occupational Medicine, Preventive Medicine, the Center for Community-based Training and Research, and the Center for Nutrition. These collaborative relationships now provide mutually beneficial opportunities for health research, including joint residency training and shared resources, to name a few.
The Department of Family and Community Medicine offers full primary care services at the Meharry Clinic and Meharry Family Health Care at Skyline physicians center locations. We also support a number of community health initiatives as part of our fulfillment of Meharry’s mission to eliminate health disparities.
Grant Initiatives
NCMI seeks to promote the use of community mapping, data visualization, and citizen science to address health disparities. The NCMI has engaged students in local schools to use public participatory geographic information systems to map potential mosquito grounds and safe routes to school. It also supports an annual Public Health Hackathon that brings together computer programmers and public health personnel to work together to identify local public health concerns and strengthen the local public health response.
The college wide PCMH seeks to design an integrative and collaborative, patient centered, curriculum that will lay the foundation for training medical and dental students and residents on the six components the curriculum:
- Enhances access and continuity of care
- Identifies and manages patient chronic illnesses
- Plans and manages care through team-based services
- Patient self-care support and community resources
- Population Health Management
- Continuous Quality Improvement
The NCMEDR seeks to transform primary care training and clinical practice in the United States to better address the needs of vulnerable populations (LGBTq, homeless, and migrant farmworkers) through curriculum transformation.
The HDRCOE seeks to eliminate health disparities, promote health equity, inform public policy, and transform public health practice through the advancement of team science and the application of computational methods, geographic information systems, and spatial temporal analysis through an exposome lens. The exposome considers the mechanisms and pathways through which the natural, built, social and policy environments affect personal health outcomes and population level disparities across space, time and the life course.
IMNashville was developed to promote collaboration between academic and community partners to improve the health status and eliminate health disparities among the residents of Nashville/Davidson County.
The IMMemphis website was established to provide easy access to data about health outcomes and environmental conditions and exposures which shape behaviors and access to resources and opportunities and have been shown to result in health disparities. The website was designed to provide access to data can be used by community partners to identify problems and generate solutions which will lead to a healthier Memphis.
The Department of Family and Community Medicine has been authorized by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Diabetes Prevention Program to conduct a local Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP).
This research-based program aims to help participants stop and reverse pre-diabetes through positive lifestyle changes.
Participants will work with a CDC trained facilitator and learn to set realistic goals, make healthy habits and manage stress.
For more information about the Diabetes Prevention Program, please contact Patricia Walker RN, Project Manager by filling the form below.