This week on White Coat Wednesday, we sit down with Dr Oriane Ezedine, a 2022 UQ-Ochsner medical graduate. Interviewed by current fourth-year student Alekya Tummala, Oriane shares her rich multicultural background with parents from Lebanon and France and time spent growing up in West Africa. She graduated from the University of California San Diego after studying Human Biology and Business before embarking on her medical journey with the UQ-Ochsner Doctor of Medicine (MD) program.
As a fourth-year medical student Oriane was the President of the Ochsner Chapter of the Gold Humanism Honor Society (GHHS). The Gold Humanism Honor Society is a community of medical students, physicians, and other leaders who have been selected by their peers for their compassionate care. GHHS reinforces and supports the importance of the human connection in healthcare, which is essential for the health of patients and clinicians. Founded in 2002, GHHS now has more than 180 chapters in medical schools and residency programs and more than 45,000 members. UQ-Ochsner is the first international medical graduate program to get it’s own chapter.
Oriane saw her involvement with GHHS as an opportunity to take part in a joint effort to provide quality care for patients, embracing and fostering a compassionate environment but also as an opportunity to give back to the community, be inspired by peers and share important values.
Together with the rest of the Chapter team, a lot of work was dedicated to the Healthy State by 2030 project, an initiative to enhance healthcare access, improve health equity and health outcomes by raising Louisiana’s ranking from 50th to 40th in the national reports.
We discuss what the medical students can achieve during their medical studies to support this goal which includes one of Oriane’s passion projects, focusing on the importance of social determinants of health and looking on how to include this component within the curriculum.
After four years of hard work in the UQ-Ochsner MD program, Oriane matched at LSU New Orleans-Ochsner in psychiatry. She wants to take those GHHS values into her residency and beyond and is more passionate than ever about health equity.
