Community Engagement and Public Service Activities

The first WooHealth Hackathon hosted by UMMS with the Academic Health Collaborative of Worcester brought together students and faculty from 9 area colleges and universities to brainstorm innovative solutions on a public health challenge:  how to improve physical access to health care.

Approximately 750 backpacks with the UMMS logo were ordered along with all the supplies needed to do your daily tasks.  This initiative is made possible by funds raised by the UMMS community through the annual giving campaign and donated specifically to the North Quadrant Support Services.  UMass Chan volunteers enjoy this activities annually.

Part 1: Our current medical professionals were taught during their training with images, almost exclusively, of white patients. It is an unfortunate reality that most studies and published work involves white patients. There continues to be a dearth of information about and pictures of skin pathology with darker skin tones.

This impacts UMass Chan too. This reality of unbalanced information about and pictures of skin pathology from darker skin tones is problematic for many reasons. Most simply, pathology looks different so there is a missing piece of education. Further, with different presentations, there can be a delay in the correct diagnosis.

Our group is planning to begin to counteract this gap in medical teaching by offering optional educational lectures this spring and summer to staff at the Family Health Center of Worcester, with the focus on clinical signs and symptoms in black and brown skin. Dermatology residents will review our lecture material and assist with the project to ensure appropriate, accurate information is presented. Our group would hold this lecture once a week for six weeks, with half being live in person (COVID-19 permitting) and half being on Zoom, so that whoever wanted to attend would be able to find something that worked for their schedule. The Zooms would also be recorded, so it could be a resource for additional Family Medicine and Community Health faculty and residents who teach and practice at sites other than Queen St., even if they cannot attend the Zoom. 

Further, we plan on buying Band-Aids of all skin tones for the Family Health Center of Worcester. We believe this would foster further relevant dialogue and hopefully lead to more understanding of some of the more subtle ways healthcare and race interact. This would pay for roughly 150 boxes of Band-Aids.

Part 2: We understand that at UMass Chan Medical School, there is currently a DRIVE Initiative (the school’s current effort to create a representative and bias-free curriculum across all domains of research and clinical education) and a SOM curriculum diversity team that is engaging in similar efforts here on campus. We hope to build off of their efforts—and plan to work with Dr. Fischer on coordinating with the already established institutional efforts—to help bring our shared goals forward, together. We have discussed with faculty our plans to create and add at least one 1-hour optional lecture of supplemental curriculum in person with recording on (COVID-19 permitting) throughout each of the four years that will focus on teaching of pathology in darker skin tones specifically. Again, we would record these lectures, so we could also add it to the DRIVE initiative’s resource collection, which should further increase potential for impact and allow for sustainability after we’ve graduated.

Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing students will be integrated into the Worcester Free Care Collaborative and collaborate with the existing T.H. Chan School of Medicine students and volunteer staff to provide free medical care and additional resources to those who are uninsured or underresourced.

In July of 2021, 26 members of the Commonwealth Medicine's Clinical Pharmacy Services team and their families volunteered at the Community Harvest Program in Grafton. They picked 97 pounds of beans, 25 pounds of broccoli, 2200 pounds of cabbage, 835 pounds of summer squash, and 480 pounds of zucchini. That's the equivalent of 18,830 individual servings of food for people in need. The group enjoyed the team-building aspect of this activity since they had been working remotely for several months. The team presented their project during a CWM Innovation Station celebration in January 2022. Innovation Stations are a key component of our strategic plan, allowing business units to innovate. At that time, there were 41 Innovation Stations which has led to the implementation of more than 300 new ideas for CWM.