Blue Cross and Blue Shield to honor UF professor
Nancy Hardt, M.D., a professor in the University of Florida College of Medicine, will be honored at the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida Foundation’s 2013 Sapphire Awards and Symposium Thursday and Friday (Feb. 21 and Feb. 22).
The Sapphire Awards are Florida’s only statewide honors to recognize programs, organizations and individuals who have demonstrated excellence and innovation in community health. The two-day event will be held at The Peabody Hotel in Orlando.
Hardt, a professor of pathology and obstetrics and gynecology and program director of UF’s health equity and service learning programs, is being honored for her innovation in community health. This includes her work with UF’s Mobile Outreach Clinic, elementary school health interprofessional programs and service learning programs.
This is the second year the Sapphire Award has gone to an individual. In 2012, Charles Mahan, M.D., president of the National Board of Public Health, received the award.
“It’s a huge honor to receive this award as an individual after Mahan, whom I greatly admire as a doctor and a mentor,” Hardt said.
Hardt helped create UF’s mobile clinic, which operates out of a bus, in January 2010 when Shands AGH closed. The goal was to replace some of the services lost, especially outpatient programs and services for uninsured community members, Hardt said.
Since then, the clinic, which is the second oldest mobile clinic bus in the country, has seen about 10,000 visits for primary and reproductive health care.
Sapphire Awards traditionally include award money, to be donated to the winner’s nonprofit organization of choice.
“We have a number of projects that are in need of being sustained, like the mobile clinic,” Hardt said.
Hardt plans on bringing the whole outreach mobile clinic team to the awards ceremony. From the bus driver to the only clinic nurse, about eight people will join Hardt in Orlando to receive the Sapphire Award. Incidentally, the mobile outreach clinic team is larger than the number of people who can fit on the bus at one time, Hardt said.“The external validation of our community work is really important. To be recognized at the state level for university efforts on behalf of the underserved is gratifying,” she said.
More information about the event can be found at www.bluefoundationfl.com. For more information about the mobile outreach clinic visit: www.outreach.med.ufl.edu.