STFM PRESENTS 2017 SOCIETY AWARDS

2017 Curtis G. Hames Research Award

This award, supported by the Department of Family Medicine through the MCG Foundation’s Hames Endowment of the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, honors an individual whose career over the years exemplifies dedication to research in family medicine.

The 2017 Curtis G. Hames Research Award Recipient is Mack Ruffin, MD, MPH, chair of Family and Community Medicine at Penn State College of Medicine. Dr Ruffin’s research focus is cancer prevention via primary intervention strategies and early detection. He began his research funding with a KO7 Career Development Award from NCI focused on practice transformation in the early 1990s and since has had a series of RO1s focused on colorectal cancer prevention. He was a member of NCI Early Detection Research Network for colorectal cancer. With support from the State of Michigan, he developed an interactive shared decision tool to help patients determine their preferred method of getting checked for colorectal cancer. He is the only family physician to hold a NCI Mid-Career Award for excellence in research and mentoring for 11 years.

Dr Ruffin began his academic career in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan, advanced to the rank of tenured professor, and served as associate chair for Research for 12 years leading the department to the top 10 in research funding. He was the inaugural holder of the Dr Max and Buena Licheter Research Professorship in Family Medicine and was voted into the Michigan Research League of Excellence in 2014.

2017 STFM Best Research Paper Award

This award recognizes the best research paper published in a peer-reviewed journal between July 1, 2015, and June 30, 2016. The first author must be an STFM member. The STFM Research Committee bases the award selection on the quality of the research and its potential impact. The 2017 STFM Best Research Paper was “Practical Opportunities for Healthy Diet and Physical Activity: Relationship to Intentions, Behaviors, and Body Mass Index” by Robert L. Ferrer, MD, MPH, Sandra K. Burge, PhD, Raymond F. Palmer, PhD, and Inez Cruz, PhD, MSW, The RRNeT Investigators.¹

The winning paper was the result of a study that set out to (1) confirm a method of measuring practical opportunities for healthy diet and physical activity, and (2) evaluate the utility of this new tool to understand the contexts for people’s health behavior choices. The study found that practical opportunities for healthy diet and physical activity are measurable and predict behavioral intentions, diet quality, activity minutes, and body mass index. The findings underline the need to understand the complexity of people’s lives as part of promoting healthy behaviors. Assessing opportunities in health behavior management could lead to more effective, efficient, and respectful interventions.

2017 STFM Advocate Award

This award honors an STFM member for outstanding work in political advocacy at the local, state, or national level. The recipient’s efforts are not restricted to legislative work but cannot be solely individual patient advocacy. The 2017 STFM Advocate Award went to Anne Kittendorf, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan.

Dr Kittendorf has had a passion for advocacy since residency. She learned quickly how poverty, education, resources, psychosocial support, environmental quality, and employment all affect the ability of her patients to improve their own health and quality of life. Early in her career, Dr Kittendorf was able to see firsthand how advocacy can affect health policy. This provided her a deeper understanding of how the medical system works, how it fails providers and patients alike, and how true change is implemented on both local and national levels. Because she had not had an adequate exposure to these topics during her training as a medical student and resident physician, she was determined to empower learners to understand how policy is created and implemented. She has created an Advocacy and Health Policy Curriculum within University of Michigan FMR that helps challenge assumptions that residents may have about the roles physicians have as leaders in crafting health-related policy, as well as to foster their own idealism and sense of social justice. Dr Kittendorf empowers students and residents to think of themselves as advocates as they develop their own areas of clinical interest, and gives them a set of tools that they can rely upon in order to further develop these passions.

2017 F. Marian Bishop Award

This award, sponsored by the STFM Foundation, is named in honor of Dr F. Marian Bishop and is presented to an individual who has significantly enhanced the credibility of family medicine by a sustained, long-term commitment to family medicine in academic settings. The 2017 F. Marian Bishop Award winner is Peter Carek, MD, MS, professor and chair of the Department of Community Health and Family Medicine at the University of Florida. Currently, Dr Carek is the chair of the ACGME Council of Review Committee Chairs, a member of the ACGME Board of Directors and Executive Committee, and a member of the ACGME Common Program Requirements Phase 1 and Physician Well-Being Task Forces.

Previously, Dr Carek served as director of the MUSC/Trident Family Medicine Residency Program. He also served as chairman of the Resident Research Symposium Committee for South Carolina Area Health Education Consortium, board member and treasurer of the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors, board member and president of the Annals of Family Medicine, Inc, and chair of the ACGME Review Committee for Family Medicine.

Dr Carek is a widely recognized author and presenter. He has served as principal investigator on several Health Resources and Services Administration funded grants. He is associate editor for the Journal of Graduate Medical Education and serves as a reviewer for multiple journals. His areas of interest include graduate medical education, quality improvement in patient care and medical education, and sports medicine.

STFM Innovative Program Award

This award honors excellence in the development of an original educational program or activity for family medicine residents, students, or faculty that has had a significant, positive impact on family medicine education.

The 2017 STFM Innovative Program Award winner was The Adolescent Health Initiative’s (AHI) Adolescent Champion Model. The Adolescent Champion model uses innovative approaches to teach faculty, residents, and other health professionals to improve the quality of primary care services for adolescent patients. The Champion Model, a structured, multi-pronged quality improvement intervention, uses innovative approaches to teach faculty, residents, and other health professionals to improve the quality of primary care services for adolescent patients.

The model, specifically created to be implemented within a busy ambulatory care clinical sites, has sites identify a multidisciplinary champion team to undergo training on adolescent-centered care. That team then delivers pre-packaged trainings to other staff and providers at their site, makes youth-friendly site changes, helps implement a standardized flow to confidentially screen adolescents for risky behaviors, and completes a quality improvement project regarding confidentiality practices. Sites that participated in the Champion model had significant changes in adolescent patient satisfaction with their care, and changes in provider and staff attitudes related to both organizational change and care of adolescents.

STFM Gold Humanism Award

This award, funded in part by The Arnold P. Gold Foundation, honors an STFM member who best embodies the attributes of humanism in medicine through his or her work as a family medicine faculty member. The 2017 STFM Gold Humanism Award winner is Ronald Epstein, MD, director of the Center for Communication and Disparities Research and co-director of the Mindful Practice Programs at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry where he is professor of Family Medicine, Psychiatry, Oncology, and Medicine (Palliative Care).

Dr Epstein, author of Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness and Humanity, is a family physician, teacher, and researcher, who has devoted his career to understanding the inner lives of clinicians and patients, and improving communication, quality, and resilience in health care. His groundbreaking research on mindful practice has led to innovative programs that promote mindfulness, communication, and self-awareness. These programs have inspired and helped a generation of physicians to practice more attentively, develop stronger relationships with patients, approach difficult decisions more mindfully, develop resilience to combat burnout, and be more present when patients need it the most. He is the recipient of numerous lifetime achievement awards relating to communication and humanism, a Fulbright scholarship at the Institute for Health Studies in Barcelona, and research fellowships at the University of Sydney and the Brocher Institute in Geneva.

STFM Excellence in Education Award

This award recognizes STFM members who have demonstrated excellence in teaching, curriculum development, mentoring, research, or leadership in education at regional or national levels. The 2017 STFM Excellence in Education Award Winner is Stephen Ratcliffe, MD, MSPH, program director at Lancaster General Hospital FMR, Lancaster, PA. He began his teaching career in Utah where he maintained a continuity practice in a federally qualified health center in Salt Lake City, Utah for 20 years. From 1993 to 2002, he also served as division chief and residency program director for Family Medicine at the University of Utah.

Dr Ratcliffe has always had an interest in maternal child health, particularly in the area of low birth weight/prematurity prevention. His textbook, Family Medicine Obstetrics, is required reading for family physicians all around the world providing obstetric care. He is also the founder of the Family Medicine Education Consortium IMPLICIT Network, a practice-based continuous quality improvement network of family medicine residency programs in the Eastern United States. He is an original contributor to the Advanced Life Support in Obstetrics Course and taught in numerous courses over the past 25 years. He has been a regular presence on the faculty and as a course director for the AAFP Family-Centered Maternity Care Conference.

2017 Lynn and Joan Carmichael STFM Recognition Award

Named in honor of Lynn and Joan Carmichael, this award is presented to an STFM member or nonmember for outstanding service to family medicine education, including enhancing resources available for its support, defending or supporting its objectives, serving as an outstanding role model, or providing other notable service to the discipline. The 2017 Lynn and Joan Carmichael STFM Recognition Award Winner is Jerry Kruse, MD, MSPH, dean and provost of Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and CEO of SIU Healthcare.

A national advocate for innovation in medical education and the advancement of health care systems, Dr Kruse’s focus is to fulfill the Triple Aim + 1: medical education and health care that are more effective, efficient, equitable, and enjoyable for all. He embraces the rapid changes in technology and communication, in health care delivery, in medical education, and in biomedical research.

Dr Kruse has held positions with many national organizations to represent primary care, graduate education, address quality issues, and advance the changing health care workforce. These include the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (president 2012–2013), Association of Departments of Family Medicine, the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors, and the North American Primary Care Research Group. He is a member of the Board of Directors for the American Board of Family Medicine and for Family Medicine for America’s Health. He has served on the Council on Graduate Medical Education, the leading health care workforce policy body that advised Health and Human Services Secretaries Michael Leavitt and Kathleen Sebelius and the health care legislation authorizing committees of Congress.

To learn more about all STFM awards and scholarships, visit http://www.stfm.org/CareerDevelopment/Awards.