A Capsule Glance at the Kedren-CDU Medical Residency Partnership
The are many advantages that accrue from a successful residency training partnership between a medical education program and a clinical site. Among them are the financial incentives of the partnership, the opportunity to provide a professional training venue in a community of high need, and the opportunity to augment existing services that builds goodwill and heightens the receptivity of treatment by clients.
The relationship between Kedren and CDU has all of those components and more. Both institutions have multiple, direct service affiliations with the Los Angeles County Department of Health. Both are outgrowths of the movement to localize effective community health services, beginning with the federal Community Mental Health Act( CMHA) of 1963. The legislation was part of President John F. Kennedy’ s New Frontier initiative.
This legislation enabled construction of local mental health centers to provide for community-based care, as an alternative to institutionalization. At the centers, patients could be treated while working and living at home. There were a number of such centers funded in the short term in the County during the 1960s, notably Kedren at 42nd Street and Avalon Boulevard, and the Central City Community Health Center, originally located at 42nd Street and Broadway in south LA. Back in the day, both programs offered a range of expertise with community mental health services as the core component.
Kedren has loomed as an important linkage to that past by sheer force of being a sustainable entity where others have gone out of business, relocated out of the local area, or be rendered unable to keep up with the still-pervasive need. Kedren’ s relationship with CDU is both longstanding as well as the demonstration of how well two institutions with similar missions can collaborate. The medical resident program at Kedren, funded under the leadership of then-County
Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas in 2018, provided a restart of the CDU resident program that had been dormant for some years.
Kedren President Dr. John Griffith provided a valid and timely rationale for the establishment of the collaboration.“ Kedren has been trying to do things with Charles Drew for quite some time. We were trying to get a residency program for several years, and it’ s finally happened,” he noted.
Acknowledging the ties that were forged as an outgrowth of the Watts Rebellion, the groundwork for the new residency program was established under the leadership of COM Dean Deborah Prothrow-Stith.“ We met and found that we have common goals and aspirations relative to creating a system in South Central Los Angeles, to be able to address the needs of African Americans and other minority groups in the area,” acknowledged Dr. Griffith.
“ And the reason why I want us to work together is that we’ re both wanting to do the same thing. We want to bring minority physicians into the area, because heretofore when people have come through, they stay a few months. But no one was trying to get to the fundamental needs of the community. The second reason being that between us, there’ s enough synergy and a lot of forceful things that we can do to make a very good impression on the service area,”
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 14