Student honored with national Public Health Award from United States Public Health Service
Fourth-year medical student Brooke Buckingham has been selected to receive a United States Public Health Service (USPHS) 2024 Excellence in Public Health Award. The goal of the USPHS is to promote and protect the health and safety of our nation. This award recognizes medical students who have positively impacted the public health needs of their community and beyond.
Brooke has been shown to be a dedicated and resourceful student as she developed and directed public health related programs and educational experiences for our students and those in need in our area, statewide, and nationally. She advanced her individual interests in Preventive Medicine and Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) by her coordination and promotion of an "Online Resolution Writing Workshop" for students. The long-term benefits of this endeavor to develop health policy that may lead to meaningful legislation to improve the human condition are significant. She went on to become a primary author for a 2023 OSMA Policy Compendium item which dealt with Pregnancy-Related Mortality in Ohio.
Although the focus of this award is on activities during medical school, it also recognizes prior accomplishments that signaled the depth of a student's interest in public health: Ms. Buckingham came to this medical school from Miami University magna cum laude with a B.S. in Biochemistry and a Minor in Medical Sociology. She was a Phi Beta Kappa inductee and had received the Senior Service Award for Intellectual & Cultural Leadership. She had an extensive history of global health travel to Peru & Nicaragua and was chosen to attend a United Nations student conference in Malaysia based on her dedication to humanitarian health issues.
She had an impressive list of leadership roles starting in her first year of medical school when she was elected President of the AMA-Medical Student Section on our campus. She then served as Chair of Global Public Health at the annual meeting in Chicago with the AMA working to improve U.S. health in terms of policies & legislation. Being a student member of the American College of Physicians gave her an opportunity to attend their Leadership Advocacy Day to lobby at the U.S. Capitol for strengthening legislation for the Patients and Providers Act of 2023 & The Kids' Act of 2023.
Because of her additional interest in Women's Health, Brooke spent most of a summer working with the YWCA Northwest Ohio where she was able to participate with Community Health Workers to start an Infant Mortality Awareness Program. She expressed gratitude for the education she received there in writing grants and the opportunity to assist some of their medically underserved patients.
This student was an optimizer of opportunities to find competitive rotations to augment her knowledge base. Two of the programs she gained acceptance to were very specific to her interests. She spent a month in the summer of 2023 at the Harvard Medical School's SDOH Rotation during which time she developed a concept map of patient care services within the Cambridge Health Alliance to be used by medical students and physicians. The other example was a month she spent this January of 2024 at the University of California San Diego General Medicine Residency Program where she attended faculty clinics dealing with asylum seekers' medical screenings & stabilization, Population and Maternal Health.
Finally, Brooke "met her match" for her residency in Chicago at the University of Illinois for Internal Medicine with Special Tracks in Public Health.
This U.S. Public Health Service Award gives applause to this student for her accomplishments, and it gives honor to this medical school that helped to educate and encourage her.
Article written by Dr. Donna Woodson.