Press Release

Date: 06-05-09
Name: Jerry Carey
Phone: 856-566-6171
Email: careyge@umdnj.edu

UMDNJ Student Group Receives National Award to Help Camden Teens Stay Healthy

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STRATFORD - A student group at the UMDNJ-School of Osteopathic Medicine, under the guidance of the school's Department of Family Medicine, has been named one of just seven recipients of a 2009 Caring for Community grant from the Association of American Medical Colleges. The grant will support the REACH (Revitalizing Education and Advancing Camden's Health) project that will implement youth-initiated community health service projects in Camden and will use a problem-based learning approach to teach preventative health to select groups of Camden middle school students. The grant provides $11,800 for the first year of the project with the potential to receive an additional $17,000 over the next three years.

"REACH is an innovative approach to combat the complex, chronic health problems facing Camden residents," said Dr. Carman Ciervo, chair of the Department of Family Medicine. "In Camden, one in four children is born to a teenage parent and one in four students fails to graduate high school. REACH volunteers from UMDNJ will help Camden middle school students to identify health issues in their own community and to create service projects to address those problems. REACH volunteers will also work to recruit minority students into the health professions."

The UMDNJ-School of Osteopathic Medicine is the only osteopathic medical school selected to receive a Caring for Community grant this year. Project REACH will collaborate with a number of other institutions, including the Camden Board of Education, Rutgers University and the Camden Area Health Education Center (AHEC).

Second year medical students Hyun Ouk Hong and Farhad Modarai created the REACH program and serve as the administrators for the project's first year. They will be joined by five other UMDNJ-School of Osteopathic Medicine students on the REACH executive board and more than a dozen other medical school students who will volunteer as mentors for students from the Camden middle school. Dr. Ciervo will serve as the project's administrative officer and medical reviewer for the problem based learning modules.

The UMDNJ-School of Osteopathic Medicine is dedicated to providing excellence in medical education, research and health care for New Jersey and the nation. An emphasis on primary health care and community health services reflects the school's osteopathic philosophy, with centers of excellence that demonstrate its commitment to developing clinically skillful, compassionate and culturally competent physicians from diverse backgrounds, who are prepared to become leaders in their communities.

UMDNJ is the nation's largest free-standing public health sciences university with more than 5,700 students attending the state's three medical schools, its only dental school, a graduate school of biomedical sciences, a school of health related professions, a school of nursing and its only school of public health, on five campuses. Annually, there are more than two million patient visits to UMDNJ facilities and faculty at campuses in Newark, New Brunswick/ Piscataway, Scotch Plains, Camden and Stratford. UMDNJ operates University Hospital, a Level I Trauma Center in Newark, and University Behavioral HealthCare, a statewide mental health and addiction services network.