Jessica Morales of West Jordan, third-year medical student at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, attends invitation-only leadership summit

2017 Oct 18

Jessica Morales of West Jordan, a third-year medical student at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, recently attended Primary Care Progress's (PCP) annual Gregg Stracks Leadership Summit, an invitation-only, three-day training bringing together faculty, student and professional leaders from across PCP's national network. The summit featured hands-on, interactive sessions meant to teach early- and mid-career health professionals how to thrive in a rapidly evolving healthcare environment by building leadership competencies critical for team-building, advocacy and change management. The summit was held in Minneapolis Aug. 18-20.

Jessica was also prominently featured in a video of the event discussing the importance of PCP's goals, including the need to develop interdisciplinary teams to effectively deal with the social risk factors that affect individual and population health. The video may be viewed at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo3kIicRiKY&feature=youtu.be

Jessica was chosen to speak in the video based on the power of her personal story. Jessica says she grew up without health insurance. "As a child, I thought it was just my family," she said. "We couldn't go to the doctor, we couldn't afford it. My mother always treated us with home remedies. As I grew older, I realized my parents lived in fear and tried to keep me and my two brothers from taking part in any kind of activity - like skating - where we could get hurt. I also began to realize it wasn't just us. There were other families living as we did. That's when I decided I absolutely wanted, and needed, to go into medicine. I've been given the opportunity to get an education and now my responsibility is to help families like mine."

Influenced by her childhood experiences, Jessica is certain she will choose family medicine as her specialty when she graduates in 2019. Since her first year of medical school, Jessica got involved in Geisinger Commonwealth's student chapter of Primary Care Progress, by attending a leadership series held one Saturday a month at the school.

Jessica said her ultimate goal is to help bring about positive change in primary care by influencing public policy. She is presently the regional policy chair of the Latino Medical Student Association (LMSA) representing the Northeast region of the U.S. and will soon travel to Washington, D.C. to meet with Congressional leaders and join other members of LMSA in learning about policy advocacy as part of the fourth annual LMSA National Policy Summit.