Catherine Korman is a Medical student and a McGill Global Health Scholar supported by the Margaret W. Siber MDCM 1970 and George R. Siber MDCM 1970 Global Heath Scholar Award. Catherine will work with Professor Alayne Adams of the Department of Family Medicine this summer.
Meet Catherine
"Hello! My name is Catherine Korman, and I am a first-year medical student. This summer I will be working on a global health project that interests itself with addressing the social determinants of health through social prescription. At every step of my education, I have earnestly searched for ways to better understand the needs of certain vulnerable populations in hopes of making them feel a little bit more at home in a society that may at times make them feel like outsiders. Through this project, I am seeking to further develop my toolbox to address the needs of other vulnerable populations. I am eager to begin this project as I deem it has the potential to be very impactful and may provide the healthcare network with insightful information as to the barriers and facilitators with regards to the implementation of such a system. A fun fact about me is that I love dubstep and I am hoping to learn how to shuffle this summer!"
About Catherine's Project
"Social assessment tools are used in many different settings, i.e., clinical, research, etc., and there exists a wide variety of them. However, despite the numerous tools that have been developed to assist health providers and allied health professionals in their social needs assessment, these tools often are not validated via pragmatic and psychometric evidence. Therefore, my role has been to search the literature in hopes of finding different information about these tools to better understand what makes a tool appropriate to assess this type of critical information. Topics like accuracy, delivery, duration, feasibility and population are some themes that are of interest to the research team in the development of our social prescription tool. The strengths and weaknesses of the tools are also assessed and their critical questions are brought to light via the quick literature review that I have undertaken."
What is the most exciting or surprising aspect of your internship so far?
"I am very surprised about the immense amount of social assessment tools that exist that are not validated via any gold standard measurement. Considering the impact of social determinants of health on healthcare outcomes, I would have expected more tools to have pragmatic and psychometric evidence of their effectiveness in assessing social needs. Hopefully, in the years to come, more research will be done on this topic in hopes of validating a greater number of social assessment tools to minimize the discrepancies between the social needs assessments performed by the healthcare providers and the allied health professionals across institutions."
