Elizabeth Palmarozzi, DO Chairman, Associate Professor

Welcome to the web site for the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth. The purpose for establishing this site is to share the exciting, innovative and diverse activities that are in progress and evolving as our health science center responds to the challenges of more creative educational models for teaching medical (including our physician assistant) students and residents, as well as responding to the explosion of managed care. Our focus and success at the UNT Health Science Center have always been primary health care.

The Department of Family and Community Medicine accepts the premise that family medicine is the pivotal component of primary care and we have responded by providing leadership within the institution by providing didactic or clinical preceptorships through each of the four years of student education, role-modeling through these activities and other student organizations, and development of data collections, outcome measures and other scholarly pursuits to accomplish the goals and objectives of the department. (See the department's Vision, Mission, Goals & Philosophy Goals Statements.)

Our department is diverse. We have divisions and areas of interest in pre-doctoral and postdoctoral education: both urban and rural student and resident activities, emergency medicine, sports medicine and correctional medicine, and a physician assistant studies program with interdisciplinary teaching. All of these activities provide a rich source for scholarly activities to verify our educational methods, allow continuous quality improvement, and to share our experiences with others.

My responsibility as a department chair is to guide the faculty into fulfilling our collectively-developed goals and objectives and supporting the individual faculty into realizing their professional aspirations in a supportive, collegial environment. I invite anyone visiting our web site to contact faculty within the department for purposes of collaboration, information sharing, or interest in joining our exciting adventure in academic family medicine.