Waltham/Worcester
– March 15th – Sara G. Shields, M.D., a physician at the Family Health Center of
Worcester, has been honored by her peers of the Worcester District Medical
Society as the district’s 2017 Community Clinician of the Year, an award
recognizing her professionalism and contributions as a physician. She will
receive the award at the district’s annual meeting April 12 at the Beechwood
Hotel in Worcester.
In nominating her
for the honor, her colleagues recognized Dr. Shield’s “dedication to the
Worcester community, her commitment to excellence in all areas of maternal and
infant care, her care of the disadvantaged and underserved, and her involvement
in multiple regional, national, and international community service
activities.”
Board certified in
family medicine, Dr. Shields has served patients at the Family Health Center of
Worcester since 1995. As part of her
work at the Center, she helped begin the health center's participation in a program
called Centering Pregnancy, which consists of group prenatal visits and has
been shown in national studies to reduce preterm birth in low-income
women.
Dr. Shields is
also a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at the
University of Massachusetts Medical School and has served as a mentor to scores
of resident physicians and medical students.
In addition to her
clinical and academic roles, Dr. Shields is Chair of the Worcester Healthy Baby
Collaborative (formerly the Worcester Infant Mortality Reduction Task Force).
She joined that group in 2001, served as Vice Chair from 2011-2016 and has been
Chair since 2016.
A widely published
author and lecturer on maternity care and family medicine, she is a co-author,
with Dr. Lucy Candib, of Woman-Centered
Maternity Care in Pregnancy and Childbirth, a textbook based on the
patient-centered model of maternity care published in 2010.
Dr. Shields earned
her B.A. in English, cum laude, in
1984 from Harvard-Radcliffe College, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
She received her M.D. from the University of California at San Francisco in
1989 and was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, the national medical honor
society. During a Fellowship in maternal
and child health at Brown University from 1992-1994, she earned a master’s
degree in community health.
She was elected a
Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians in 2005 and became a member
of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s Committee on Maternal and Perinatal
Welfare in 2014. She also serves on the
editorial boards of Family Medicine
and the Family, Systems and Health
Journal.
Dr. Shields has
been previously honored with the Chair’s Award from the Department of Family
Medicine and Community Health at UMass Memorial Healthcare, the Community
Service Award from the UMass Women’s Faculty Committee, and the William Damon
Award for Mentorship from the UMass Family Medicine Residency Program. She resides in Northborough.
The Community
Clinician of the Year Award was established in 1998 by the Massachusetts
Medical Society to recognize a physician from each of the Society’s 20 district
medical societies who has made significant contributions to his or her patients
and the community. The Worcester District has more than 2,100 physician members.
The
Massachusetts Medical Society, with some 25,000 physicians and student members,
is dedicated to educating and advocating for the patients and physicians of
Massachusetts. The Society, under the auspices of NEJM Group, publishes the New
England Journal of Medicine, a leading global medical journal and web site, and
Journal Watch alerts and newsletters covering 13 specialties. The Society is
also a leader in continuing medical education providing accredited and
certified activities across the globe for physicians and other health care
professionals. Founded in 1781, MMS is
the oldest continuously operating medical society in the country. For more
information please visit www.massmed.org, www.nejm.org, or www.jwatch.org.
