Recent Community Initiatives
The Family Medicine Residency Program at St. Mary Medical Center has dedicated its time to meeting community health needs through a vision screening program and culinary medicine education.
Recently, the residency program received grant funding to narrow the gap in health inequity amongst diabetic patients in need of routine retinopathy screening. Pennsylvania Academy of Family Physicians (PAFP) awarded the program $25,000 to purchase and implement a specialized eye camera to screen Bensalem patients with diabetes for Diabetic Retinopathy, a leading cause of blindness in the United States.
In only a few months, this quality improvement initiative has increased the percentage of diabetic patients in our Bensalem practice obtaining the guideline-recommended annual retinopathy screening from four percent to over 14 percent. Additionally, it uncovered its first case of treatable retinopathy and was accepted for poster presentation at the PAFP Annual Research Day on April 4, 2026.
In a separate grant offering, the Pennsylvania Osteopathic Medical Association (POMA) honored the residency program with a Community Impact Grant to develop and administer a longitudinal Culinary Medicine curriculum to the entire residency program.
Resident Education in Culinary Interventions for Patient Empowerment (RECIPE), a collaboration with Vetri Community Partnership and the Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance, aims to empower our physicians to understand and teach food as medicine—equipping them with practical skills to guide patients in making sustainable dietary changes.
By embedding this education into residency training, especially in diverse communities, physicians can foster culturally sensitive nutrition interventions that improve health outcomes, reduce health care disparities and strengthen community wellness through informed, accessible dietary practices—making this a unique offering within graduate medical education.
Such initiatives highlight our residency program’s dedication to constantly innovate and apply lessons learned to our practice of medicine. Furthermore, they serve as a testament to our residency’s commitment to lifelong learning and continual community engagement.