Highland Hospital Press Room
Susan McDaniel, Ph.D., Receives National Award,
Plans to Donate $25,000 to Family Medicine
Rochester, N.Y., January 6, 2012 — Susan H. McDaniel, Ph.D., associate chair of the URMC Department of Family Medicine and director of the Institute for the Family in the URMC Department of Psychiatry, will receive a 2011 Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award.
The $25,000 award recognizes educators in psychology, medicine and law who have inspired a student or students to create an organization which has demonstrably benefited the community at large. The award will be presented at a ceremony Jan. 7 at the Carter Center in Atlanta.
McDaniel says she plans to give the $25,000 to the Department of Family Medicine.
“I want to establish an endowment of sorts, so that interest over time can be used for Family Medicine faculty who wants to do a mini-project or conference related to psychosocial medicine or psychosocial medicine education,” McDaniel says.
Tillman Farley, M.D., medical director of the Salud Family Health Centers in Colorado, nominated McDaniel for the award. McDaniel was a mentor of Farley when he was a Family Medicine resident at the Medical Center 20 years ago.
“It’s very meaningful to receive recognition from a prior trainee who has achieved so much himself,” McDaniel said. “I stand in for my colleagues, especially Dr. Tom Campbell, and then Barbara Gawinski, David Seaburn and others who trained Tillman.”
In his nomination statement, Farley said he chose Rochester’s Family Medicine residency program because of its emphasis on the biopsychosocial model of care and the idea that mental health and medical health are intimately interwoven and cannot be separated. He described McDaniel as the residency program’s “most eloquent and passionate teacher” of integrated care.
Over the last 20 years, Farley said he applied what he learned from McDaniel and the Family Medicine residency as he developed integrated care programs for practices in Palmyra, N.Y., rural Van Horn, Texas, and currently in northern Colorado. In each case, he brought behavioral health professionals into the practices to routinely see patients.
The Salud Family Health Centers serves approximately 80,000 unduplicated patients annually. Twenty-five behavioral health professionals work for Salud. They are “considered fully integrated primary care providers, not ancillary staff, and have full access to all patients without having to be invited into a room by a physician,” said Farley, who has published widely on this model of integrated care.
“The reason Salud Family Health Centers is so far ahead of everyone else in its development and implementation is because Susan McDaniel taught the concepts to me,” Farley said.
The award is named for Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman, an educator, author and pioneer in the field of psychology. One of the first female psychology professors at Columbia University and a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, she wrote nine books and textbooks about child and adolescent psychology. Dr. Beckman, who died in 1988, was a champion of gender equality and an advocate for the advancement of women in academia. The award was established in 2008 through the will of her daughter.
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