Philadelphia, Pa., December 11, 2005
– Elinor Graham, MD, MPH, was recognized today with the first Helen Rodriguez-Trias Award for Social Justice at the 133 rd American Public Health Association Annual Meeting & Exposition.
As a pediatrician for the past 35 years, Graham has specialized in providing medical care to impoverished families and helping build community support structures for those families. She currently is both associate professor of pediatrics and adjunct professor of pediatric dentistry at the University of Washington.
Graham counts Trias as one of her many important mentors and remembers when Trias came to Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx in 1971 to be director of pediatrics when Graham was a pediatric resident. After that residency, she joined community activists from the East Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization to set up the Mud Creek Health Project in Floyd County, Ky., and spent several years working there and in West Virginia.
Graham then moved to Seattle and worked for the Seattle King County Department of Public Health at the Children and Teen Clinic for 10 years. Her community work at that time focused on expanding pediatric services at health department clinics in the county, improving school health services and training low-income and immigrant parents to be more effective advocates for their children’s education.
Graham then moved back East to earn a master’s in public health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., and work at the Harborview Medical Center, a private hospital and trauma center that serves low-income and immigrant/refugee families and is a major training site for health care workers. In addition to directing its Children and Teen Clinic, Graham helped organize the Community House Calls program and EthnoMed Web sites, which have provided case management and community outreach services to the area’s many immigrant communities.
Among Graham’s other work, she has supported local pediatric residents in conducting health projects at international sites and has joined them in El Salvador. She has authored numerous publications and has been recognized with such honors as the Outstanding Teacher Award from the University of Washington and the Health Care Delivery Award from the Ambulatory Pediatric Association.