Capacity Building
It is vital that we develop meaningful partnerships with the residents and organizations of the neighborhoods in which our hospitals are located: Buffalo’s historic Fruit Belt and the Delavan-Grider community.
We are here to listen, learn, and amplify the talented community organizations, research, and community initiatives that have been dedicated to the Buffalo community for decades. Our hope is to aid in these ongoing efforts, and bring attention to the significant work that has been done. If there are ways in which we are able to assist in these efforts, drawing on our own skill sets, we stand ready and committed to doing so. The partnerships we are proud to have with community are listed below:
We are partnering with the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences to develop regularly occurring community town halls in which neighborhood residents are invited to share their experiences and needs with our attending surgeons and trainees. It is our hope that greater opportunities for open dialogue will serve to build trust, scaffold new collaborations, and demystify the surgical profession. We aim to work with local residents to develop tools that will allow us to better serve the community. These community partnerships will be the foundation of our efforts to mitigate health disparities and address structural racism.
UB DroneSTEM
The UB Department of Surgery is a sponsor of the Drone STEM competition, in which middle and high school students demonstrate motor skills that emulate surgical techniques. The event was developed to build student confidence and inspire students in Western New York to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
The students use video games and 3D simulators to learn some of the hand-eye coordination and fine muscle movements that surgeons rely on when performing.
“As physicians in the Jacobs School, which was built, on purpose, right in the middle of our city, we feel we have an obligation to the students who ride by our building in school buses every day to help them understand the wonderful opportunity that they can benefit from that’s right in front of them in this medical school,” says Steven D. Schwaitzberg, MD, professor and chair of surgery.
