News and Events

A front-page article in the Buffalo News on rural Allegany County in need of COVID-19 vaccines quotes Annmarie Zimmermann, MD, clinical assistant professor of family medicine and a member of UB’s family medicine rural health residency program. "I think the state system of having this all be online didn’t work very well for the elderly,” Zimmermann said. As her practice has gotten vaccine doses, staff has called in senior patients and, in some cases, helped them register on office computers,, according to the article. Those who can get an appointment often must travel 80 or more miles to a vaccine clinic in Buffalo or Rochester, a challenge in communities where some lack access to reliable transportation.

Since its inception in 2014, the University at Buffalo Human Rights Initiative, a medical student group, has played an important role in helping to document and assess evidence of torture in people seeking refuge and asylum in Western New York. Recently, the group was asked to assist their counterparts in Syracuse and at SUNY Upstate Medical University. Kim Strong Griswold, MD, professor of family medicine and psychiatry, the UB group’s faculty mentor, gave a virtual talk, “Insights and Best Practices for Medical Evaluations in the Context of Immigration Applications,” as part of a panel presentation for potential medical volunteers in Syracuse. “The Jacobs School group is an established Physicians for Human Rights clinic,” Griswold says. “Because we’ve been doing medical evaluations for years and have been training our students in this important work, we were asked to provide some assistance as the Syracuse effort gets off the ground.”