Goff Selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for 2024-2025 for New Zealand
She will focus on health care delivery during the perinatal period and health care for people with physical disabilities
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Dr. Sarah Goff, Professor and Chair of Health Promotion and Policy, has been selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for 2024-2025 for New Zealand where she will continue her research on quality and equity in health care systems.
Fulbright Scholar Awards are prestigious and competitive fellowships that provide unique opportunities for scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. Fulbright scholars also play a critical role in U.S. public diplomacy, establishing long-term relationships between people and nations. Alumni of the Fulbright Program include 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, and thousands of leaders and world-renowned experts in academia and many other fields across the private, public, and non-profit sectors.
Goff, a health services researcher and practicing pediatrician and internist, will focus on health care delivery during the perinatal period and health care for people with physical disabilities during her Fulbright year. These areas represent two of the six key strategies in New Zealand’s Pae Ora Healthy Futures Strategies. She will be working with a core team of collaborators with shared interests at Victoria University of Wellington and collaborators in Auckland, Dunedin, and Sydney, Australia.
“Being selected as a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand is an incredible gift,” says Goff. “I am so excited to have this remarkable opportunity to work with leading health services researchers in New Zealand and Australia who share my passion for using community-engaged research as a tool to create more equitable health care systems.”
While there, Goff will engage with communities within academia, health care systems, and health service users to better understand New Zealand’s approaches to health care equity. “I hope to establish deep and lasting connections to the New Zealand communities I will be working with and build long term collaborations,” adds Goff. “Ultimately, I hope to study and learn from approaches to health care equity in multiple countries and develop systems of information sharing to improve health care for priority populations across the globe. I am most excited to develop these new partnerships, learn from the communities I will be working with, and contribute to them.”
Through her research, Goff broadly seeks to address issues of quality and equity in the U.S. health care system. Much of her work focuses on health and health care for women and children. She currently leads two NIH-funded studies examining the effectiveness of Medicaid Accountable Care Organization implementation in Massachusetts on quality of care, utilization and insurance-based disparities for children with asthma and behavioral/mental health disorders. She is also a co-investigator on the following studies: 1) implementation of depression treatment in dialysis units (Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute); 2) implementation of a community doula-hospital partnership to provide care for Black birthing people in Springfield, MA (Health Policy Commission); 3) transitions of care for women with hypertensive diseases of pregnancy (NIH); 4) changes in fluoride varnish application following passage of the Affordable Care Act (NIH); 5) comparing the effectiveness of two interventions to improve the evaluation process for kidney transplant in New Mexico (Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute); and 6) using participatory action research methods to address high rates of poor mental health amongst youth identifying as LGBTQ+.