Perry Lecture to Feature Expert On Health Workforce Issues

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Leonard J. Finocchio, associate director for state programs for the Center for the Health Professions at the University of California, San Francisco, will deliver the 1997 J. Warren Perry Lecture at the University at Buffalo.

He will speak at 4 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 10, in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

Associate director of the Pew Health Professions Commission, a program of The Pew Charitable Trusts, Finocchio will discuss “The Health Professions Face the Millennium.”

The Perry lecture, sponsored annually by the UB School of Health Related Professions, is supported by an endowment established in honor of Perry, a former dean of the school. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Finocchio’s responsibilities at the Center for Health Professions involve researching and writing about health-professions regulation, the allied-health workforce, community health workers, medical education and health workforce policy. He has consulted on workforce issues for the National Commission on Allied Health, the National Conference of State Legislatures, several states and many health professional schools.

For the Pew Health Professions Commission, established in 1990, Finocchio develops recommendations for changes in health-professions education and workforce policy.

He also has worked as a primary-care analyst for the U.S. Public Health Service and as a wilderness emergency-care instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he designed, implemented and evaluated wilderness first-aid and technical-rescue curricula for the Outdoor Adventures program.

An adjunct professor in the Department of Health Education at San Francisco State University, Finocchio is working toward his doctorate in health policy at the University of Michigan. He holds a master’s degree in public health from UCLA.

The lecture will be preceded by a research poster session.