Dr. Konrad is program director of the Primary Care and the Health Professions Research Program at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, Chapel Hill, NC. He is also Research Professor in the Schools of Public Health, Medicine, and Pharmacy at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a M.A and Ph.D. in Sociology from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Konrad's academic and research interests lie in the study of health professionals, with a special interest in those who choose to serve vulnerable population groups, a somewhat specific branch of what has come to be called "physician workforce planning". He has examined how medical staff organization affects career structure, leadership, job satisfaction, and clinical autonomy of physicians working in corporately organized practice settings, and has recently completed an assessment of the National Health Service Corps and other programs designed to recruit, educate, support, and retain physicians in medically underserved communities. He has also been instrumental in developing the Physician Worklife Study, an ongoing multi-disciplinary collaboration that examines the impact of the changing health care system on physician job satisfaction, mental and physical health.

Another area of research interests is the assessment of health status and care requirements of vulnerable populations. As a co-investigator on the Self-Care Assessment of Community-Based Elderly project, he has observed how patterns of self-management of symptoms by older persons seem to affect their medical care use. He is also profiling long term relationships between African American elders and their physicians in rural North Carolina. He also works with clinicians who care for patients with sickle cell disease on issues of patient adherence to therapeutic regimens of care.

Dr. Konrad also serves on the core faculties of the NRSA Health Services Research pre-and post-doctoral training program and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program in the UNC School of Medicine.

For more information about Dr. Konrad please visit his website.

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Updated 04/23/02raj, 04/27/02raj minority_health@unc.edu