Creighton President: Whole-patient care for a healthier Arizona
On Oct. 21, 2024, the Arizona Capitol Times published an opinion editorial from Creighton President the Rev. Daniel S. Hendrickson, SJ, PhD, on how the University is helping the state address its critical healthcare shortage through offering health sciences education to nearly 1,000 future professionals and investing in population health initiatives:
This August, U.S. News and World Report published a study ranking the health of nearly 3,000 counties across the country on a scale of 1 to 100. In a troubling trend, none of Arizona’s 15 counties featured among the top 500 and only two ranked ahead of the national average.
The need for additional healthcare providers to serve Arizona’s increasing population has been the focus of much conversation in my time as president of Creighton University. In response, we expanded our presence in Phoenix by opening the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust Health Sciences Building in 2021. Three years later, the interdisciplinary clinical training facility sits at the heart of the Phoenix Medical Quarter and is educating more than 850 aspiring healthcare leaders.
However, filling a clinical staffing shortage is not enough on its own. According to U.S. News & World Report’s study, Maricopa County, with a population of roughly 4.4 million according to the 2020 U.S. Census, ranked highest among Arizona’s counties with a score of 55 out of 100 while Apache County, with a population of just over 66,000, was 5 out of 100. These are disparities that must also be addressed.
[...]
The challenge of building capacity for population health in Arizona and beyond aligns with our core mission as educators—to ensure the next generation of healthcare leaders is equipped to care for the whole patient at every stage of their healing. It is why our university launched the Institute for Population Health last October and have engaged in efforts such as a recent symposium on population health held on our Phoenix campus that brought in experts from across the country to discuss innovative solutions to this complex problem.
Read the full editorial online at the Arizona Capitol Times.
