‘Silent’ Partners No More
Public Trust Initiative Invites Community onto ‘Ground Floor’ of Research |
| By Carla Garnett |
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It’s one of the first rules about sound investments: Get in on the ground floor. Now NIH is taking the advice to heart: the agency’s Public Trust Initiative recently launched its Partners in Research Program, a unique new opportunity for scientists to team up with community organizations. Announced this past fall and set to award grants in 2008, the 2-year pilot program has been fast-tracked to take effect in the current fiscal year. Applications are due Jan. 12, 2008.
“This program is designed to address the practical questions surrounding the development
of true partnerships between researchers and the public,” said NINR director Dr. Patricia Grady, who cochairs the initiative with NICHD deputy director Dr. Yvonne Maddox. “The goals of these partnerships are to facilitate discussion of the health care needs and interests of the community, develop and implement research programs that address these needs, and ultimately to communicate the results of this research.”
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Hearing the Call of Stories
Literature Bolsters Medical Education, Says Plotz |
| By Belle Waring |
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The source of drama is conflict: Stories that lack it simply don’t hook us and fail to move us. A heartfelt statement of conflict—a problem,
a need, a critical
gap—is how Dr. Paul Plotz, chief of the Arthritis and Rheumatism Branch, NIAMS, opened his recent lecture in the Great Teachers Series.
“It troubles me and many physicians
of my age,” he told a full house in Lipsett Amphitheater,
“that changes in the practice of medicine, many of them wonderful, also serve to deprive students and young physicians of what seemed to us to have been the most intense and formative
part of our own education.” And that is the time to learn at the bedside; to hear the call of stories told by patients and by practitioners seeking to heal them.
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