Panagis Galiatsatos roams the cavernous community room of Poe Homes, a public housing complex in West Baltimore. A couple of months ago, he was here with advice about heart health. Now, he’s explaining how to treat sprains and concussions.
His audience, again, is about 25 children and teens, the drummers and dancers of the Christian Warriors Marching Band. Again, they sit on folding chairs arranged in a circle around Galiatsatos, a pulmonary and critical care fellow in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Galiatsatos has about 20 minutes before the marchers resume their twice-weekly practice.
“Do you remember me?” he asks.
“Yeeesss,” comes the drawn-out chorus of a reply.
“Do you remember my name?”
“Nooooo.”
Galiatsatos chuckles, tells his young audience to call him Dr. G. He knows his name is hard to remember. He also knows he’s forming relationships, even as the marchers shift and whisper in their seats. Maybe some of the young people in this room will remember his advice for treating a sprain. Or maybe they’ll remember, next time they visit a doctor, that this doctor made them smile.
“The main thing is connecting with and loving the community,” says Ernest King, the marching band’s longtime director.
That connection is the reason Galiatsatos helped found and still directs Medicine for the Greater Good (MGG), a program lauded by U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings and featured in the Baltimore Sun and New England Journal of Medicine.
MGG began in 2011 as a series of workshops that encouraged trainees and experts to discuss nonclinical topics, like health policy, behavioral counseling and social determinants of health. In 2013, it expanded to include a requirement that all internal medicine residents at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center complete at least one project that benefits the community. Many do more.
The program also attracts undergraduate and graduate students from across Johns Hopkins, even though they are not required to participate. Accompanying Galiatsatos at Poe Homes, for example, are nursing student Kathleen Littleton and Siddhi Sundar, a postbaccaulaureate premed student in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
Medicine for the Greater Good | Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center
Medicine for the Greater Good is an initiative at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center aimed at educating health providers about health disparities and inequities while promoting community partnership to promote health and wellness.