Health Systems Science | Population and Social Determinants of Health With Dr. Tonya Fancher and MS2 Mustafa Shakir

InsideTheBoards for the USMLE, COMLEX & Medical School

Welcome back to our Health Systems Science series! This episode is about Population and Social Determinants of Health.

Tonya Fancher, MD, MPH, is associate dean of workforce innovation and community engagement at UC Davis. She has created UME and GME pathways that address workforce shortages, including as PI on an AMA Accelerating Change in Medical Education grant with Kaiser Permanente to create a 3-year MD pathway and as co-PI on an AMA Accelerating Change in Resident Education grant with OHSU to create a regional collaborative to address physician shortages in rural, tribal, urban and communities between Sacramento and Portland. After completing a primary care general internal medicine residency at NYU and Bellevue Hospital, Dr. Fancher spent four years in the US Air Force. She graduated from Cornell University where she majored in Classics and in Biology. She is on Twitter @TonyaFancher.

Mustafa Shakir is a second year medical student at UC Davis. He is currently preparing to take STEP 1, and is very excited to start year 3 to explore his varying interest in multiple specialties. In the past year, he has been extensively involved with the student run clinics at UCD, especially during the COVID pandemic. He is also currently working on his first soon-to-be publication relating to Alzheimer’s disease. He previously graduated from UC Santa Barbara, and obtained a BS in Biopsychology.

Following the COVID-19 outbreak, concerns for student safety, shortages in personal PPE, and not-yet-defined safety protocols resulted in the closure of all twelve UC Davis Student-Run Clinics (SRCs). The SRCs are the sole providers of healthcare for thousands of multilingual, medically underserved, uninsured or marginalized members of the Sacramento community. Through the SRC’s, healthcare students engage in interprofessional collaboration to advocate for equitable patient care and learn to combat the barriers imposed by social determinants of health. Therefore, the aim of this project was to safely reestablish in-person operations at the SRCs for patients, who already have tenuous access to care, to receive essential services.

Sections from this episode include:

• The importance of the social determinants and their impact on healthcare outcomes
• The importance of diversity in the healthcare workforce
• Keeping care accessible for vulnerable and underserved populations

With support from Elsevier, and produced in collaboration with the American Medical Association, the HSS series seeks to broaden students’ understanding of the nature of medicine, medical education, and what separates them from other human endeavors. Medicine is not a “pure science,” a kind of “applied biology.” Rather, it is fundamentally an art that uses science. As a discipline, Health Systems Science considers those ideas and concepts which are integral to medicine as a profession but don’t fall under the domain of the clinical or basic sciences.

The National Board of Medical Examiners includes HSS topics in its USMLE Content Outline and even offers a dedicated Health Systems Science subject examination. Each episode of this series will include on-the-go learning with practice exam questions explained by expert guests.

This series is sponsored by Panacea Financial: Banking Built for Doctors, by Doctors. ITB and Panacea share a common goal which is to make med school better. Panacea Financial is designed to handle the unique situation of medical students. We hope you will check them out to see how they can make your life easier.

Learn more about the series and view the content outline on the ITB website. https://insidetheboards.com/Health-Systems-Science/. You can also listen to episodes in the ITB app organized into an HSS Playlist.

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