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Kraft Center for Community Health

This innovative program at Partners, funded by a $15 million gift from the Kraft Family Foundation, attract providers to high- need areas and give them the skills needed to produce meaningful, lasting impacts on the health of their communities. The Center aims to address three key elements that define the challenge in attracting and retaining quality community-based primary care physicians.

The first is attracting physicians to practice in underserved areas, which studies have shown is best done during a physician's clinical training. The second element is providing the right kind of education-that is, clinical and analytic training that equips young physicians with the tools to care for patients in setting where social, environmental, and economic factors have a strong influence on health and to make progress on difficult community-wide or population health problem. Finally, the third component addresses retention by offering continuing education and mentorship targeted toward community practice. Through its programs and activities, the Center intends to:

  • inspire and develop a new generation of physician leaders in primary care, internal medicine, pediatrics, family medicine, psychiatry, and OB/GYN who are committed and well-prepared to initiate and lead community-based and policy-driven efforts to solve complex community health issues at the local, city, state and national levels;
  • attract and retain physicians and masters prepared nurses for careers in community health centers and other care delivery settings that serve low- and moderate-income populations;
  • create and disseminate innovative curricula that build upon the unique multidisciplinary design of the Center's programs;
  • develop new models for collaboration between academic medical centers and community health centers; and
  • become a national resource for innovative training and leadership development in community health.

Initial programmatic and organizational components of the Kraft Center include an innovative, multidisciplinary post-residency fellowship in community health and Masters in Public Health (the Kraft Fellowship Program in Community Health Leadership), the identification and support of exemplar sites for leadership development and training in community health (mentor practice sites), an initiative to attract and retain physicians and masters prepared nurses to practice in community health centers and similar settings (the Kraft Practitioner Program); and a National Leadership Council that will assist in developing the Center's national leadership strategy.

For more information, visit the Kraft Center for Community Health website.