President Clancy receives UVA medical education award
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President Clancy receives national medical education award

University of Tulsa President and Professor of Community Medicine Gerard Clancy has been honored with the 2017 Brodie Medical Education Scholar Award by the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville. The Brodie Committee at UVA grants the annual award to an international innovator in socially accountable medical education.

The Brodie Award is presented during the Academy of Distinguished Educators Week at UVA. Clancy was recognized at the institution’s Medical Center Hour, a weekly multidisciplinary public forum on medicine and society on March 1, 2017. The event was combined with UVA’s Medicine Grand Rounds forum that offers professional development for clinicians and trainees in internal medicine.

As a recipient of the Brodie Award, Clancy presented two lectures titled “Success in Reversing Urban Health Disparities” and “A City-Wide Mental Illness Prevention Initiative.” His presentations examined how residency in American cities determines predicted life expectancy. In 2005, Tulsa was one of the first cities to address dramatic variations in neighborhood life expectancy after discovering a 14-year difference between the north quadrant and midtown. Clancy discussed the journey, specific initiatives and lessons learned to improve health in north Tulsa from 2005 to 2015.

His mental illness prevention presentation included insight on how Clancy’s father was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa for 40 years and played a critical role in the Iowa 500 project. During Clancy’s psychiatry residency, his father taught him that “mental illness cannot be prevented.” Clancy now oversees a planning initiative that provides a 10-year plan to improve mental health in the region. He addressed interventions that could be applied city wide to prevent and intervene early when diagnosing and treating mental illness.

Clancy became TU president in November 2016 after serving as TU’s vice president of health affairs and dean of the Oxley College of Health Sciences, which launched in 2015. Under his leadership, the college has introduced many new initiatives, earning TU and Tulsa national recognition for improvements in community health. Currently, the Oxley College of Health Sciences is launching a doctor of nursing practice degree to address the region’s healthcare provider shortage. Clancy advocated for the creation of TU’s True Blue Neighbors Behavioral Health Clinic, which opened in 2015 to provide affordable and supported mental health assessment and treatment services to children and adults. Clients can access all of the clinic’s therapy and assessment services for free.

Clancy also was instrumental in bringing the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship to Oklahoma, a social health and leadership program available to graduate students from TU, the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University.

Prior to TU, Clancy held leadership roles at OU-Tulsa including dean of the OU-TU School of Community Medicine, professor of psychiatry, Morningside Health Care Foundation Endowed Chair in Leadership and president of OU-Tulsa. During his OU-Tulsa presidency, he oversaw the addition of more than $327 million in new facilities, academic degree programs, endowed faculty chairs and student scholarships. The campus established educational and research partnerships with more than 100 community agencies. Clancy also helped develop a community health network that includes after-hours free clinics for the underserved, pediatric school-based clinics in disadvantaged areas, mobile psychiatric teams and a specialty health clinic.

Clancy’s March 1, 2017, lecture at UVA School of Medicine is available on YouTube.