A new $10 million partnership will put medical students and other care providers under one roof to serve people of color and other underprivileged communities in Maricopa County. The partnership involves Creighton University, St. Vincent de Paul and Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust.
For more than a decade, students in their third and fourth years at Creighton’s medical school, as well as faculty members, have volunteered monthly at the Virginia G. Piper Medical Clinic in Phoenix. Now the clinic will be the main teaching facility for first and second-year students, too. Together they will help underrepresented communities and uninsured Arizonans receive medical care that’s currently out of reach.
Many uninsured Arizonans do not have access to preventative or specialty care, and they end up in emergency rooms because of unmanaged chronic disease. This can result in poorer outcomes for patients long-term, but it also increases the cost of care that hospitals must absorb.
Under the partnership, the Creighton School of Medicine will hire a Virginia G. Piper Chair in medicine and chief medical officer. The chair will be embedded at St. Vincent de Paul’s Virginia G. Piper Medical Clinic near downtown Phoenix.
