image: Keck School of Medicine volunteers getting food ready for distribution to the community.
Credit: Photo/USC
The Keck School of Medicine of USC has been recognized for its commitment to partnering with its neighbors in Los Angeles to identify and address their critical needs. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has chosen the Keck School of Medicine for this year’s prestigious Spencer Foreman Award for Outstanding Community Engagement.
Founded in 1876 and based in Washington, D.C., the AAMC is a not-for-profit association dedicated to transforming health through medical education, health care, medical research and community collaborations. In partnership with the American Medical Association, the AAMC co-sponsors the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which serves as the primary accrediting agency for medical education programs in North America.
The Keck School of Medicine of USC has a long-standing tradition of prioritizing community as a core pillar of its mission, alongside education, research, and patient care. This commitment is reflected in a broad array of initiatives aimed at supporting residents near the Health Sciences and University Park campuses, as well as various neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles. The school’s programs encompass everything from health and wellness education to outreach and inclusion for cutting-edge clinical trials to scalable, evidence-based programs that address the biggest health challenges facing local communities.
“The relationship with our community is foundationally built on trust and engaged partnerships,” said Carolyn Meltzer, MD, dean of the Keck School of Medicine, holder of the May S. and John H. Hooval, M.D., Dean’s Chair and professor of radiology. “The depth and breadth of our 32 community partnerships — from empowering and opening doors for children and young adults, to providing access to trusted health information, to inclusive clinical trial participation — helps to remove barriers and leads to tangibly better health outcomes. We’re grateful that the AAMC has recognized this hard work with the Spencer Foreman Award.”
Listening is fundamental
The Keck School of Medicine defines its community agenda in collaboration with the very same communities that it serves.
Every three years, the medical school and Keck Medicine of USC, the university’s health care system, conduct a review assessing local needs. Through this process, leaders from the community serve as guides in identifying problems and shaping how to address them — a key part of refreshing overall priorities for community programs.
“We aim to be a vital source of information and resources for the communities around us, to help meet their needs, and to make those communities part of our decision-making process,” said Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati, PhD, MPH, the Keck School of Medicine’s senior associate dean for community and workforce development initiatives and a Distinguished Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences. “Community residents are critical in a lot of the things that we do.”
Lessons in service
For USC medical students, experience with service to the Keck School of Medicine’s neighbors starts before they even enter the classroom. Keck in the Community Day is a staple of orientation week, when incoming learners and school educators and leaders team up to volunteer at sites such as food banks and K–12 schools.
“We set the stage, from the moment students get here, that community service is important to us,” said Donna Elliott, MD, EdD, the Keck School of Medicine’s vice dean for medical education and professor and chair of the Department of Medical Education. “We work side by side with them. It’s meant to say, ‘This is who we are as a school.’ And I think students come here because of that commitment.”
Keck in the Community is the service-learning component of a required course called “Health Justice and Systems of Care” spanning the first three semesters of the MD program. The goal is to train future physicians to look beyond simply diagnosing a patient’s illness to also understand the overarching social and environmental factors that influence health and access to care. That coursework, in turn, is a cornerstone of the Physician-Citizen-Scholar Curriculum that was launched in 2021.
“We want to create a legacy of students trained to be good citizens in the clinic with patients, good citizens within a community, and good citizens in terms of advocacy and other work at a larger scale,” Elliott said. “We’re unleashing this entire generation from our school who will be better physicians because of the perspective they will bring to all of their care.”
Options for a brighter future
A host of youth educational programs are powered by student and trainee volunteers from across the Keck School of Medicine’s programs. Many initiatives aim to create a pathway to medical school for children who may not have otherwise considered it a possibility. Some programs have broader goals.
For example, the monthly PA Pathways Program introduces students from kindergarten through college to careers in the health fields. The Youth Workforce Academy, launched in response to community feedback, engages young adults between 18 and 24 who are not working or going to school. Training for certificates in topics such as CPR offers them an advantage for finding jobs in the health sciences.
Half of past participants are now employed, and one in five are on the path to college.
“These young people get the chance to see how much bigger their world could be,” said Baezconde-Garbanati, who also serves as associate director for community outreach and engagement at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. “We help them build a better future, with tools that give them an edge when they’re looking for work.”
The medical school’s longest-running youth educational initiative, spanning over 50 years, is Med-COR. With weekly academic enrichment sessions for high schoolers and engagement with their parents, it has achieved standout results for graduation rates and matriculation in higher education.
“We’re seeing kids get their high school diplomas at rates far surpassing that of LAUSD in general, and many going on to college,” Elliott said. “It’s exciting and makes for a great example of our long-standing impact and commitment to our communities.”
New solutions for difficult problems, with room to grow
The USC Street Medicine program may be a perfect encapsulation of the Keck School of Medicine’s ethos of meeting the needs of underserved Angelenos by meeting them right where they are.
Teams led by doctors, physician assistants, nurse practitioners and nurses don backpacks and go out to provide care for people who are unhoused where they live and feel most at ease. Students and trainees rotate through to learn the ins and outs of street medicine, including those in a street medicine track of the Family Medicine Residency Program.
At its start in 2018, USC Street Medicine initially operated in a more limited area around the Health Sciences Campus and select neighborhoods with larger populations of people experiencing homelessness. Since then, the program has expanded to serve sections of Hollywood, Mid-City, South L.A. and beyond. Along the way, USC Street Medicine has built a track record of documented results reducing hospital admissions, shortening hospital stays and connecting clients to housing.
“USC Street Medicine started small, but now it’s a model program for the entire country,” said Corinne Feldman, MMS, PA-C, USC Street Medicine’s workforce development director and a clinical assistant professor of family medicine. “The Keck School of Medicine is leading the way by creating infrastructure and a curriculum around something that is atypical for academic medicine.”
Igniting discovery in service of Angelenos
For another example of the medical school’s close partnership with neighbors, Baezconde-Garbanati highlights the USC Norris cancer center’s community advisory board.
Comprising survivors and advocates representing the diverse populations of Los Angeles, the 10-member board meets with leaders and researchers several times a year to provide advice. Their points of view inform the cancer center’s strategic plan and even the work of individual labs.
“Members of the cancer center present not only their findings, but also the ideas they’re currently conceptualizing,” Baezconde-Garbanati said. “This approach is unique and it’s just one of the ways that our communities have input into the research we pursue. Their involvement serves as an essential component of our research efforts, demonstrating how these two mission areas are very much intertwined.”
In a metropolis where more than 100 languages are spoken, the Keck School of Medicine calibrates its clinical science to ensure that local populations benefit from the latest advances. Educating and recruiting study participants that reflect the city, in all its range and complexity, is one aspect of this drive; another is identifying and lowering barriers that interfere with participation.
“We need to create therapies that meet the needs of the people we serve,” Meltzer said. “Engaging those from many different backgrounds in clinical trials means that we can develop and personalize interventions — across the entire gamut from cell to society — that make the biggest difference for the greatest number of people.”