About Medical College of Wisconsin Family and Community Medicine
Our Vision & Mission
Family Medicine will be the foundation for individual, family, and community health.
Mission
The DFCM educates learners, performs relevant research, and develops leaders who integrate the best in care for the sick and provide health/wellness care for all in a medical environment filled with trust, respect, and accountability emphasizing:
- Doctor-family-patient relationship building evidence-based medicine
- Practice relevance with advanced access and office based technology
- Research to improve health care quality, cost and policies
- Community partnerships that make a difference
Welcome from the Chair | Joseph W. Gravel Jr., MD, FAAFP, Professor
Welcome to the MCW Department of Family and Community Medicine! We are proud of our...
- Outstanding residency and fellowship programs
- Innovative medical student education
- Highly successful community-oriented research division
- Clinical care that addresses human suffering
- Nationally- recognized community engagement
Our department, our medical school, and our healthcare systems are committed to creating a just and equitable society, a fundamental obligation of the healing professions. We invite you to join us in this challenging and inspiring work!
Family Medicine was created in the 1960s, arising out of the same social milieu and community-based activism that saw the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the rise of the Civil Rights movement, and the recognition of healthcare as a fundamental aspect of the social contract. Board-certified family physicians care for people of all ages and genders, in all settings. Our family physicians and nurse practitioners emphasize relationships with patients and their families, ensuring high quality, comprehensive, and coordinated personal health care in complex health care systems and our communities. We strive to understand our patients’ values and culture, often speak the same language, and are trained in community health principles. Our researchers produce new knowledge to identify and better address societal challenges and meet patient and community needs.
As an academic medical school department, we have expanded well beyond the ivory tower. Our department is immersed in the greater Milwaukee, Menomonee Falls, Appleton, Eau Claire, Green Bay, and Wausau communities, and is actively engaged throughout Wisconsin and among the national community of clinicians, educators, and researchers. We are outward-facing, working to make the greater world better while the greater world makes us better.
Finally, I’ll use a word you may not find often on a medical school department website, but is the fundamental driver for our department - love. It’s what makes a family and a community. Our work is our love made visible, which therefore demands we strive for excellence in all that we do.
I invite you to learn more about the programs and people of the MCW Department of Family and Community Medicine! Please explore our website to better understand who we are and what we’re about.
