#18: Understanding Barriers to Early Antenatal Care in Rural Georgia (Gold Student Summer Fellowship)

In this next conversation in our Gold Student Summer Fellows series, Gold Assistant Director of Program Initiatives Michelle Sloane interviews Preethi Reddi, who is a 2022 Gold Student Summer Fellow and a medical student at the Medical College of Georgia. Preethi grew up in rural Iowa, where she developed a passion for health promotion and advocacy by seeing first-hand the impact healthcare professionals made in her community. As an undergraduate at Emory University, she conducted research through the Grady Trauma Project, which studies the impacts of stress, trauma, and resilience factors on health outcomes. She also spent a summer in London studying the British National Health Service. Preethi hopes to eventually make an impact on community health just like the physicians in her hometown, including her own mom.

Through her research project titled, “A Community-Based Approach to Addressing the Rural Georgia Maternal Health Crisis by Understanding Barriers to Early Antenatal Care,” Preethi surveyed pregnant women in Brunswick, Georgia, a rural coastal community, to learn about barriers to antenatal care. She is working on developing interventions to help alleviate these barriers.

The Gold Connection is produced by the Gold Humanism Honor Society, a program of The Arnold P. Gold Foundation,  a nonprofit that champions humanism in healthcare. On this podcast, we share stories of humanism in action, as well as tools and lessons for students, clinicians, and leaders.