Chair's Message

Welcome to the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University.

Our department is a collective of extraordinary individuals working in partnership to optimize the health of all of our patients, families, and communities. By setting our sights high and committing ourselves to excellence across all our areas of activity, we bring out the best of ourselves in our daily work. We are fortunate to be supported by the resources, collaborations, and opportunities of Sidney Kimmel Medical College and of Jefferson Health across our department’s clinical care, educational, community health, and research endeavors.

The heart of our work is our patient care, including Jefferson Family Medicine Associates, a teaching practice that is accountable for the health of 30,000 people. This center is a model of what health equity can look like: people from all walks of life and representing Philadelphia’s rich diversity come to us as patients and receive a single standard of excellence in health care. The breadth of our department’s clinical services, including in-hospital care and labor & delivery services, are a living example of full spectrum family medicine training that provides continuity of care across settings in an urban environment.

Our faculty, fellows, and residents care for patients in a variety of community-based clinical settings, including the Hansjorg Wyss Wellness Center, which opened its doors in March 2021 as a model of excellence for refugee and immigrant health services; and in partnerships with community organizations that serve people experiencing or at risk for homelessness, including Project Home’s Stephen Klein Wellness Center and Pathways to Housing. The department’s clinical programs also include the Division of Sports and Exercise Medicine, the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Palliative Care, substance use disorder treatment, and the Continuing Care Program, which provides comprehensive primary care to adults with intellectual/ developmental disability.

This rich clinical learning environment supports unsurpassed educational programs for residency, fellowships, and medical student education. It guides the work of our research faculty, whose work generates new knowledge that furthers our mission’s core focus on the patients, families, and communities we serve. It is supported by our community health activities that contextualize both health and health care in the larger social structures in which we and our neighbors live.

As we work to build a future that stands on the robust foundation of our department’s decades of accomplishments, we also own and hold ourselves accountable to actively working against injustices in our society and in academic medicine. There is no space where this is more true, or where we have a higher sense of urgency, than in our dedicated efforts towards diversity, inclusion, and social justice. This work is the job of every individual in our department, and is an explicit consideration within all our activities, processes, and practices.

Our department represents a long tradition of family medicine at Jefferson, and we honor that tradition while building in the present and for the future. I hope you will use our website to explore the breadth and depth of work by our outstanding faculty members, staff, and trainees, and that you will be as impressed by their amazing accomplishments as I am.

With warm regards,

Anna Flattau, MD, MSc, MS