2007 Family Physicians Who are Changing Our World Award:
Douglas Stockman, MD
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York
Doug_Stockman@URMC.Rochester.edu
Dr. Stockman has a long history of commitment to caring for underserved populations and both practicing
and teaching International and refugee health. As a medical student, he worked for two months in Senegal,
Liberia, and the Ivory Coast as part of Operations Crossroads Africa and provided acute care to rural
villagers. Two years later, still as a medical student, Dr. Stockman spent two months in Liberia working
out of a small mud hut in a small rural village as the only health care provider in a 150 square mile area.
As a result of his experiences in Africa, Dr. Stockman founded the Organization for West African Health
(OWAH), a non-profit organization designed to support small grassroots health programs in West Africa.
As a third year Family Practice resident, he was funded to return for two months to Liberia where he
continued the work he started as a medical student and laid plans to build a clinic in a small rural village.
After completing his residency, Dr. Stockman moved to Liberia for a year to practice in Saywon Town, a
remote village than can only be reached by a two hour bush plan flight from the capital city of Monrovia,
followed by a 15 mile drive through the jungle. In this extremely remote site, Dr. Stockman built a small
medical clinic, provided health education talks, improved the local water quality, supervised latrine
construction, improved the rice yield by twenty percent, introduced more nutritious vegetables into the
villager’s diet and developed a program of maternal-child health education.
Unfortunately, his work was cut short due to the Liberian civil war, and he had to flee for his own safety.
Between 1990 and 1994, Dr. Stockman volunteered his medical services to local area migrant farm works
in Rochester and published a book entitled Community Assessment: Guidelines for Developing Countries.
Because of the ongoing war in Liberia, Dr. Stockman was unable to return to his clinic. Undeterred he
moved to Ghana in 1994 where he lived for two years in a remote village of 60 people. Here, he created a
rural health clinic similar to the one he had developed in Liberia.
For the past six years, Dr. Stockman has been a faculty member in the Department of Family Medicine at
the University of Rochester where he has created an International Health Education Track and has made the
care of refugees a priority. He has developed the largest refugee health program in Rochester and obtained
a grant from the New York State Health Department to assist with paying for medical care for uninsured
refugees.
Dr. Stockman is passionate about teaching International and refugee health to residents and to community
physicians. He has developed a program on International Health that combines didactic training and
significant overseas experiences for interested residents and faculty. He is committed to expanding the
number of highly trained health care workers in underserved areas, both in the United States and underdeveloped
areas of the world.
As Director of URMC’s International Health Program, Dr. Stockman is developing the Department’s
community health project in collaboration with the Village of San Jose in Western Honduras and Hombreto-
Hombre, an independent foundation. Two to three times a year faculty, residents and medical students
spend one month in San Jose doing community assessments and health interventions. They are currently in
the midst of a comprehensive community health assessment in San Jose and are in the process of
developing a medical clinic for the village. Dr. Stockman is heading the fund-raising effort to support these
activities. Work on the medical clinic will begin shortly and a full time Honduran nurse will be added to
staff the clinic year round. Dr. Stockman has become a role model for residents in providing humane care
for refugees and inhabitants of third World countries.
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