Patten, Ledford, Turner honored by MCG dean

Medical College of Georgia Dean David Hess, MD, gave his annual State of the College Address on Friday, Feb. 21, and also honored the campus dean who helped establish MCG’s statewide educational model, a community researcher and director of the MCG Department of Family and Community Medicine’s primary care research network, and the inaugural senior vice president and hospital president at MCG’s clinical partner, Wellstar MCG Health.

Doug Patten, MD, campus associate dean at MCG’s Southwest Regional Campus based in Albany at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, received the Community Advocate Award. Two decades ago, while serving as chief medical officer at Phoebe, Patten helped recruit the inaugural campus dean, Iqbal Khan, PhD.

“Without their combined leadership, and leadership in our Office of Academic Affairs, there may have never been a Southwest Campus,” Hess said. “Now hundreds of students each year complete all or some of their clinical rotations in one of the most medically underserved areas of our state.”

Patten came back to lead the Southwest Campus in 2017.

A graduate of LSU’s School of Medicine, he did his surgery residency at the University of South Florida, and then moved to Cordele, Georgia – about an hour up the road from Albany – to join the rural surgery practice of Bill Pannell, MD, a 1972 graduate and longtime surgery clerkship director for the Southwest Campus. It was there that he began to take notice of how low socioeconomic status and lack of access to health care created an imperfect melting pot of complicated health problems for the people he treated.

He’s made it his life’s work to help change that – by training future generations of physicians in hopes that they may one day return to the area to practice, by ensuring residential students at that campus get involved in public health, by creating programs to positively affect the health of people in the region like the initiative he helped students launch to educate area schoolchildren and their parents about how best to manage their diabetes, and by ensuring that students from high schools and colleges in the area truly understand that a career in medicine is a possibility for them.

Christy Ledford, PhD, the Curtis G. Hames Distinguished Chair and vice chair of research in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, was honored with the Professionalism Award.

In addition to her role as vice chair of research for the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Ledford is the Curtis G. Hames Distinguished Chair and director of HamesNet, the department’s primary care research network. That network’s namesake was the first physician to identify the link between environment and heart disease, launching the 40-year Evans County Heart Study – all from Claxton, Georgia.

“Dr. Hames always considered himself a country doctor who loved his community and personally saw up to 50 patients each day. That’s a legacy that Dr. Ledford also strives to embody,” Hess said. “Her philosophy is simple: to affect any kind of change you must listen and really hear what communities say they need. She truly believes that it’s her job to not just help develop programs that support community health but to prove that what is being done actually works.”

Ledford has served as principal investigator on millions of dollars in grants focused on interventions to improve health outcomes. Last year, she and Samantha Jones, PhD, a cancer biologist and pharmacologist at the Georgia Cancer Center, were awarded a $1.9 million grant from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to co-lead a study aimed at demonstrating the most effective engagement approach for underrepresented and vulnerable populations in clinical research. Also last year, she and Brittany Pooser, the executive director of the Hub for Community Innovation, were named finalists for the NIH’s Build UP Trust Challenge for their work on the COACHS initiative, which connects athletic trainers within Richmond County schools to the education and health sectors.

Ralph Turner, DBA, who has led Wellstar MCG Health since April, helping combine the cultures of one of Georgia’s largest health systems and its flagship medical school, received this year’s MCG Advocate Award.

“It has been an honor to work alongside Dr. Turner to blend our people, processes and technologies, which has not come without their own sets of challenges,” Hess said. “He has certainly earned his reputation as an enthusiastic and patient leader who truly listens and is always ready to seek out solutions. I count him as a trusted colleague and friend and look forward to our continued work together.”

Turner earned a doctorate in business administration from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and master’s degrees in health care administration and public administration from the University of Maryland and Troy University at Dothan, respectively. He served in the U.S. Army honorably for more than 21 years before launching his health care career at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as director of the Clinical Engineering Division. He’s held leadership roles at large complex health care organizations like MedStar Washington Hospital Center, University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, and Cleveland Clinic.

He joined Wellstar in 2022 as senior vice president and president at Wellstar Paulding Hospital in Hiram, Georgia.