Meet the 2020 Scholars

"What do you believe is the greatest unaddressed patient need in the CF community, and if you could, how would you try to fix it? Who would you partner with (e.g. public figure, organization) to help fix the issue and why?"

The greatest unaddressed need among patients in the Cystic Fibrosis community is the lack of access to local and adequate CF care. I know from personal experience that, for a patient living more than an hour from a CF center, planning appointments or even a simple blood draw can easily become an all day affair, causing a patient to miss out on school or work to get the care they need. Additionally, if and when a patient like myself becomes in need of hospitalization for any period of time, the distance from home can be hard both physically and emotionally. If provided the resources to remedy this difficulty, I would choose to partner with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. By going to the CFF, I could get to the root of this problem by revising policies and providing some level of training to local doctors and medical staff. This training and these changes in policy would allow local family clinics to work with major CF centers to provide a patient with suitable and convenient, coordinated care. This would in turn generate an awareness of Cystic Fibrosis throughout the medical community and provide CF patients with well informed local physicians capable of understanding and communicating with a CF center to provide care effectively and efficiently.