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Dedicated doctor and educator receives President’s Public Service Award
November 29, 2010
November 29, 2010
by Sandra Gray
© UMass Medical School Communications
Primary care physician Lucy M. Candib, MD, professor of family medicine &
community health, has been named a recipient of the 2010 University of
Massachusetts President’s Public Service Award for her compassion as a
clinician and commitment as a teacher. Given annually to individuals from each
of the five University of Massachusetts campuses, the award from the
President’s Office recognizes exemplary public service to the commonwealth. Dr.
Candib accepted her award at a ceremony held today in Boston.
“It is very gratifying to be recognized by the
University and the Medical School as a community health center physician and
community-based faculty member,” said Candib, who has been providing primary
care to patients at the federally funded Family Health Center of Worcester
(FHCW) since she began her own residency there in 1974. A graduate of Harvard
Medical School, she added the training of primary care physicians to her
responsibilities at FHCW, one of three sites for the Department of Family
Medicine & Community Health’s Worcester Medicine Residency program, upon
being named a UMMS faculty member in 1976. “I feel part of a long stream of
committed family physicians," Candib said of her teaching legacy. “Many
are now teachers, program directors and faculty themselves, many practicing in
underserved settings as they learned to do in training.”
The President’s Public Service Award is just the
latest of numerous honors that Candib has received. Among them are the F.
Marian Bishop Award from the Society for Teachers of Family Medicine for her
sustained, long-term commitment to family medicine in an academic setting;
recognition from the National Committee for Quality Assurance and the American
Diabetes Association for her program of medical care, patient education, group
support, nutrition and exercise for diabetic patients at FHCW; and the 2006 A.
Jane Fitzpatrick Community Service Award from the Worcester District Medical
Society. The author of the book Medicine and the Family: A Feminist Perspective, one of several
she has published, Candib was one of 300 American women physicians featured in
the National Library of Medicine’s “Changing the Face of Medicine” project in
2005.
While she appreciates the recognition, Candib
noted, “Most gratifying has been the continuity and longevity I have enjoyed
with many of my patients in Worcester, where I have cared for three to four
generations of a single family.” She recounted that, on several occasions, she
was honored to deliver babies of mothers whose own births she attended; her
favorite story is of the time she learned that she had delivered both the
baby’s mother and father.
Having encouraged her physician trainees and
colleagues in family medicine to be aware of the factors in their own lives and
in patients' lives that affect health and well-being, she will truly have come
full circle—as a woman, daughter and mother as well as a teacher and a
physician—when she finishes writing her own family history, a lifelong goal
that she is pleased to have begun in earnest.