CWHCM 2007 Scholarship winner

"I feel honored to have received this year's scholarship. As an aspiring physician executive, I have chosen to undertake activities that would give me insight into the physician and management sides of healthcare. Although I have been involved with healthcare in a variety of capacities since high school, my most memorable experiences have occurred during graduate school. In particular, I worked as a research assistant at the Yale-New Haven Hospital's pediatric primary care clinic. While interviewing several underinsured parents here, I learned about the numerous struggles they had faced to obtain medical care for their children. I realize now that basic healthcare is still a dream for many - for several mothers, even infant vaccinations were difficult to get due to cost and resources. And despite the aid of government programs and charity organizations, there are shocking disparities in access to care, even within individual cities such as New Haven. I see this situation as a call to action, one that I am inspired to undertake as a physician executive in the future.

Access inequalities such as these have become especially important to me as a student of public health. With knowledge about the healthcare system and administrative-level changes that could potentially improve access to healthcare, I feel more prepared to fact the types of issues I am bound to encounter as both an administrator and a medical doctor and am enthusiastic about doing so."

Madhuri Murthy, CWHCM 2007 Scholarship winner with Anne Huben-Kearney, CWHCM Past President – September 2007