STFM Recognition Award

The 2008 Recognition Award winner, Laurence Bauer, MSW, MEd, is founding chief executive officer of the Family Medicine Education Consortium (FMEC). The FMEC manages the STFM Northeast Region meeting along with a number of collaborative projects.

Mr Bauer has served as chair of the Planning Committee for the STFM Northeast Region since 1990. In this role, he has been the constant, driving, and dynamic force that has made the meeting a unique and valued educational experience for thousands of faculty, residents, and student attendees. The basic statistics, now viewed over the past 16 years of time, are mind-boggling. Larry has been the leader in raising more than $2.5 million in funding to run a meeting that has been attended by more than 4,000 students (through full-support scholarships) and more than 5,000 faculty and residents.

These formative experiences prepared him to serve as the course director for an Academic Fundraising training program, co-sponsored by the STFM New Partners Initiative, which offers leadership training to family physicians across the country.

Mr Bauer is also a clinical associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Wright State University. He also serves as director of Network Development for the Center for Innovation in Family and Community Health located in Dayton, Ohio.

STFM Excellence in Education Award

The 2008 Excellence in Education Award winner is Kent Sheets, PhD, associate professor and director of educational development at the University of Michigan. He directs the Family Medicine Faculty Development Institute, a program for faculty, fellows, and senior residents from Michigan and northwest Ohio. Kent’s major interests are in curriculum development, faculty development, student specialty choice factors, and preceptor training. He has served as a consultant or external reviewer for faculty development and/or predoctoral programs nationwide.

Dr Sheets has been active in numerous STFM activities, including serving as project director on the Curricular Guidelines for Third-year Family Medicine Clerkships Project, first and second editions of the Preceptor Education Project, and the Predoctoral Resource Network Project. Most recently, he served as curriculum consultant for the Family Medicine Curriculum Resource Project.

Within STFM, he was a member of the Education Committee, the Nominations Committee, and several STFM groups. Currently he is a member of the Predoctoral Directors Development Institute Steering Committee. He was an STFM representative to other medical organizations, including working with general internal medicine and general pediatrics groups to develop core clerkship curricula in those disciplines in the mid-1990s.

STFM Innovative Program Award

The Healer’s Art Course is recognized with the 2008 Innovative Program Award for exploring areas in medicine that are seldom taught in medical school but are essential to the development and education of future compassionate and relationship- centered physicians. These areas include wholeness and healing, grief and loss, awe and mystery, and the care of the soul and service.

The Healer’s Art is an elective course for medical students focused on creating a community of inquiry into the basic experiences, values, and intentions of professionalism. Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, first developed the course at the University of California, San Francisco in 1992 and has trained faculty to offer it at 59 medical schools in the United States and internationally.

The course’s innovative educational strategy is process driven and based on a discovery model. In a setting of mutual safety, students and faculty reflect on and share their experiences of compassion, loss, healing, awe, mystery, calling, and commitment to service. National research shows that the course is highly evaluated by students across schools who report that it offers valuable content, experiences, and learnings not typically available elsewhere in the medical school curriculum.

STFM Advocate Award

Allen Hixon, MD, receives the 2008 Advocate Award for his leadership in working with state legislators to increase the size of his family medicine residency and to fund it at the level of $4 million.

Facing the impeding closure of Hawaii’s only civilian Family Medicine Program, Dr Hixon worked with colleagues to develop an innovative statewide system of rural family medicine training. He shared this vision with policy makers, drafted legislation, and worked closely with them to see a $4 million appropriation make it through the state legislature. This new system of training does a better job of placing residents where there is a greater shortage of doctors and has doubled the number of family medicine residents in training while programs across the country are downsizing. This bill was enacted into law in July 2007 and has sparked interest in rural health workforce development in Hawaii.

Dr Hixon is a board-certified family physician and the vice chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Hawaii.He is currently the president of the Hawaii Academy of Family Physicians and a member of the AAFP Commission on Education. As the STFM nominee, Dr Hixon completed the US Department of Health and Human Services Primary Care Health Policy Fellowship. His research interests include health disparities and health workforce development.

F. Marian Bishop Leadership Award

The F. Marian Bishop Award of the STFM Foundation was established in 1990 to honor individuals who have significantly enhanced the academic credibility of family medicine by a sustained, long-term commitment to family medicine in an academic setting.

The 2008 F. Marian Bishop Leadership Award Winner, Alfred Berg, MD, MPH, has been one of the true luminaries for family medicine in the research arena. His area of expertise is clinical epidemiology in primary care settings.

He has chaired the US Preventive Service Task Force, co-chairing the Otitis Media panel convened by AHCPR, chairing the CDC STD Treatment Guidelines Panel, and currently chairing the CDC panel on Evaluation of Genomic Applications in Practice and Prevention.

Dr Berg is a member of the Institute of Medicine and chairs its Committee on the Treatment of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. He chaired the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Washington from 1999-2007. He serves as associate editor for the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.

Curtis G. Hames Research Award in Family Medicine

The Hames Consortium awarded its 2008 Curtis G. Hames Research Award to Howard Rabinowitz, MD.

This award is presented annually to acknowledge and honor those individuals whose careers exemplify dedication to research in family medicine. The recipient is selected by a Consortium which represents STFM, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the North American Primary Care Research Group, and a representative from the Hames Endowment.

Howard Rabinowitz, MD, is the Ellen M. and Dale W. Garber Professor of Family Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. Since 1976, he has served as director of Jefferson’s Physician Shortage Area Program, a special admissions and educational program that has been successful in increasing the supply and retention of family physicians in rural areas.

Dr Rabinowitz is a past-president of the American Board of Family Practice (1992-93).  From 1992-2000, he was a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Generalist Physician Initiative.  From 1993-94, Dr. Rabinowitz was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow. He also served as a consultant to the Council on Graduate Medical Education for their Sixth Report to Congress on “The Effect of Managed Care on the Physician Workforce and Medical Education”.  From 1997-2002, he was national project director and codirector of HRSA’s $8 million “UME-21” project (Undergraduate Medical Education for the 21st Century), a program to develop curricular innovations to better prepare medical students to practice in the changing health care environment.  He currently serves on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Fellowships Advisory Board, and on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. Dr Rabinowitz is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

The late Dr Hames, for whom the award is named, was internationally recognized as a pioneer in family medicine research. The award is supported by the Hames Endowment of the Department of Family Medicine, Medical College of Georgia.