We wanted to introduce ourselves – Shweta Antani, DO from Columbia University Irving Medical Center/New York Presbyterian Hospital and Padma Swamy, MD MPH from Baylor College of Medicine/Texas Children’s Hospital – as your new SIG leadership. First of all, we wanted to express how thankful we are for the leadership of Tyler Smith, MD MPH from Children’s Mercy Kansas City and Meg Tomcho, MD from Denver Health in recent years, and how excited we are to serve in this new role.
The mission of the Academic Pediatric Association Serving the Underserved Special Interest Group (SIG) is to promote health equity among all populations and educate providers on the unique challenges of caring for the underserved. PAS 2020 planning brought forth incredible work for underserved children and communities, resulting in over 90 accepted abstracts. We hope to highlight some of this work at future meetings. We planned, but had to postpone, our joint workshop with the Health Literacy SIG on technology literacy in underserved populations. Stay tuned for more information about this session!
Thank you to all the SIG members who completed the SIG survey. The survey results show that members hold advocacy and education as important activities for the Serving the Underserved SIG. SIG members would also like further opportunities for networking and collaboration across regions. We are looking for ways to engage SIG members outside of PAS. We were looking forward to meeting with many of you in person during PAS 2020 and hopefully can meet in person at PAS 2021. In the meantime, stay tuned for announcements on our virtual sessions to come!
