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What is UCHL?
What is UCHL?
The University of Connecticut Community Health Leaders (UCHL) is a community-based pre-health program founded for bridging health care disparities by addressing the social determinants of health for the State of Connecticut. The University of Connecticut is the main health system that takes care of Medicaid patients in our state, thus a great environment for such a program to exist.
UCHL will function all academic year, focusing on training pre-professional students on how they can help advocate and improve the way we deliver health care for our patients. In return, we hope these students will enter their career field more eager and prepared to tackle the social determinants of health that affect the health of our patients.
Our Mission
Our Mission
The UCHL mission is to train the next generation of health care providers who will bridge gaps in health care for patients in Connecticut by addressing the social determinants of health or other barriers that may exist for such patients.
Our Goals
Our Goals
- Create a medical student-driven pre-health pipeline program giving students the opportunity to gain clinical, research and educational experience in health care.
- Expose and develop the volunteers to care of marginalized populations through direct patient care and advocacy.
- Develop the volunteers’ knowledge of health disparities and social determinants of health through participation in structured didactic lessons and direct care of patients.
- Teach students to effectively advocate for and educate individual patients to address social determinants of health.
- Enhance the students’ competencies-based skills (e.g., personal and professional development skills) needed to enter and succeed in health care professions.
- Improve the health care outcomes of patients in participating clinical sites through activities such as patient education, connection to resources, improved access to preventative care and health wellness classes.
Our Leadership
Our Leadership
Christopher Steele, M.D./M.P.H./M.S.
Christopher Steele, M.D./M.P.H./M.S.
Dr. Steele is our lead physician at UCHL. Born and raised in Burlington, CT, Dr. Steele graduated with his MD/MPH from the University of Connecticut and completed his training at Johns Hopkins in internal medicine. He has returned to UConn to become clinical faculty for the medical school and now is course director for the health science and Social Determinant of Health (SDH) curriculum in the 3rd and 4th year of training. Dr. Steele's training is focused on bridging the gaps of the social-determinants of health and high value care. He has published in the literature on this topic and presented internationally. He practices as both an hospitalist and primary care physician in the area.
Jacqueline Steele, MS2
Jacqueline Steele, MS2
Jacquie is a medical student at UConn School of Medicine. She grew up in Greenwich, CT and attended college at Emory University where she majored in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and minored in Spanish. In college she spent her free time volunteering at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, tutoring students at local Atlanta high schools, and playing on the club field hockey team.
Jacquie is excited about being a founding member of UCHL because she wants to help patients from under-served communities have better access to health care services and she enjoys mentoring incoming pre-health students about ways they can help improve patient health outcomes.
Henry Siccardi, MS2
Henry Siccardi, MS2
Henry is a student at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Born and raised in Queens, New York before moving to Connecticut as a teenager, Henry originally pursued a career in law. Upon graduating from Fordham University in 2012 he decided to pursue a different path, eventually pivoting to medicine. Since pursuing this path he has worked extensively on community health outreach. As a member and coordinator of the Bronx Community Health Leaders and RA Program in Bridgeport, CT he spent three years leading teams of volunteers providing an array of health outreach programs to patients.
He hopes UCHL will pay forward to students and patients the incredible experiences, opportunities and mentoring from which he benefited in these programs.
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