Jeffrey Goldhagen, MD

Professor and Chief, Division of Community Pediatrics

Bridging academic medicine, public health and child advocacy

Archive almost any Florida Times-Union newspaper from the past 15 years and chances are you'll spot Jeff Goldhagen's name – as a news source, newsmaker or letter writer. But the pediatrician maintains that it's the nature of his work and not personal gain that sustains his efforts to improve children's health and well being – locally, nationally and around the world.

As an Professor and chief of the division of community pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine-Jacksonville, Jeffrey L. Goldhagen, MD, MPH, develops and oversees programs that enhance the health of all children in the community, especially those with special needs. His team of 15 UF faculty members cares for children and their families at clinics, hospitals and in communities across Jacksonville. Through its integration with the Duval County Health Department (DCHD) and many other community partners, the division provides service to patients and training for residents, conducts research and works to develop systems of care to reach our most marginalized children and families. Under his leadership, services in the division have expanded beyond primary care to include rehabilitative medicine and programs for homeless children, terminally and chronically ill children, children in foster care, teens in transition to adult care and youth with other special needs.

Like all physicians at the university, Goldhagen excels at multi-tasking. A glimpse on a typical workday would find him on his BlackBerry discussing funding for mental health programs with a foundation while a colleague from the United Kingdom rings his desk line. Meanwhile, he would be writing on his laptop, acknowledging a pediatric medical resident who has arrived for one-on-one training and preparing for a meeting. Stacks of papers on the floor around his desk represent projects aimed at improving the health of children. Lots of plates in the air at any given time; rarely do any fall.

Of his career accomplishments, Goldhagen is particularly proud of the academic-public health partnership between UF and the DCHD, which has received national recognition and generated millions of dollars in contracts and grants on behalf of children's health. DCHD's pediatric network, staffed in part by UF clinicians, is the largest in Florida.

Goldhagen largely credits the vision and commitment of Thomas Chiu,MD, MBA, a UF professor and chair of the department of pediatrics in Jacksonville, with what he called a "real coup" in engaging multiple partners to create cutting edge children's health programs.

"We are contributing to the future definition of community pediatrics here in Jacksonville," Goldhagen said. "We've created a model where the general practitioner of the past has morphed into the community pediatrician of the future who will focus on marginalized communities of children by addressing their specialized health care needs as well as social and environmental determinants. This Department of Pediatrics is providing a fertile environment for training pediatricians of the future. None of this could be possible without the leadership and support of Tom Chiu."

Chiu said of Goldhagen, "He is a visionary leader who put a lot of programs in the department on the map by winning national recognition. He is very well connected with the community and has built excellent collaboration from a lot of partners in the community, nationally and internationally."

A native of Cincinnati, Goldhagen grew up in Pittsburgh, trained and worked in Minneapolis and was a faculty member at Case Western Reserve University before joining UF. He was medical director of the Department of Public Health of Cleveland from 1991 to 1993, when he was recruited to head the DCHD, a full-time UF faculty position in the former division of general pediatrics. He served as the director of the Health Department until 2005, when he was appointed chief of the newly created UF Division of Community Pediatrics.

Goldhagen said he's always had one foot in academic medicine and the other in public health and increasingly realized how their integration was critical to children's health outcomes.

A huge challenge facing pediatricians is improving the standards of children's health and well-being in the U.S., which he said consistently ranks lowest of all developed nations, especially in the South.

"We mistreat children more than any other developed country physically, economically and educationally, as a matter of public policy," he said, citing Hurricane Katrina as an example of child suffering resulting from unmet health and mental health needs, separation from families and disruption of school and child care.

Indeed, Goldhagen has worked worldwide to advocate for children's rights and equity. In the past year his travels included Vancouver, San Antonio, Montreal, Washington, Turkey, Israel and the West Bank to train child health professionals on these issues. Most recently, he coordinated an international videoconference, hosted by UF in Jacksonville, on the impact of global climate change on children's health.

After earning his M.D. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1977 and his Master of Public Health from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in 1982, Goldhagen practiced medicine in underserved communities - from the poorest neighborhoods of Minneapolis and Cleveland to refugee camps in Thailand. He helped develop child health programs in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Romania and the Dominican Republic from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, when he said the children's rights movement took hold.

A partnership between the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Royal College of Paediatric Child Health in the UK gradually expanded to include medical professionals from South and Latin America, Europe and Africa. In 2006, Goldhagen and a handful of colleagues founded the Society for Equity in Child Health, a U.S.-based organization to advance the principles and practices of children's rights, social justice and equity. In December 2008 he spent a week in Turkey training child health professionals from such countries as Greece, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Serbia and Bulgaria, then traveled to the occupied Palestinian Territory (West Bank) to explore opportunities to introduce the training into Israel and Palestine.

"We hope that at some point we can use children's rights to bridge a group of professionals who have not worked together to the extent possible for children's health and well-being," he said. In a recent letter to the editor of the Times-Union Goldhagen urged heath care professionals to be informed and use the tools of advocacy and public policy to effect change in Gaza, where the impact of war on children is deplorable.

Goldhagen has had more than 40 articles published and has made more than 100 presentations around the globe on children's health issues. His administrative and educational work leaves little time for seeing patients, although he occasionally fills in at PedsCare, a Community Hospice of Northeast Florida program for chronically and terminally ill children, and at the Children's Medical Services' Cleft Lip/Cleft Palate Clinic and Shands' Craniofacial program. "I'm still involved intensely with the development of clinical programs," he said, "but I miss the interaction with children, families and residents."

Doctor, advocate, teacher, mentor, writer, lecturer and fundraiser all describe Goldhagen, but perhaps the role that has taught him the most about children is dad. "I learned that they are who they are at birth," said the father of four daughters and one son - from middle school to law school. "Just point them in the right direction and get out of their way." He praised his wife Diana, a former speech pathologist, for successfully raising them with a little help from him.

He quipped that his main objective in life was to live aboard a sailboat - a dream that has been deferred a decade with each child. On rare occasions, however, he carves time to sail, kayak or hike.

Goldhagen sees the traditional practice of pediatrics separating into four areas - traditional organ-related subspecialties, hospital care, behavior and mental health, and community pediatrics. He advises potential pediatricians to look closely at what they specifically want to do. The traditional pediatrician that provided care to many of us "went the way of Norman Rockwell" and new specialty physicians are emerging.

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