© 2024 Public Radio Tulsa
800 South Tucker Drive
Tulsa, OK 74104
(918) 631-2577

A listener-supported service of The University of Tulsa
classical 88.7 | public radio 89.5
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

A Conversation with Dr. Gerard Clancy, TU's Vice President for Health Affairs

Aired on Thursday, July 14th.

On this edition of ST, we are pleased to welcome back to our program Dr. Gerard Clancy, TU's Vice President for Health Affairs and Dean of the Oxley College of Health Sciences. (Dr. Clancy has also been designated as the next President of the University.) He joins us to talk about a newly announced effort aimed at addressing mental illness and substance abuse in the Tulsa area. This effort is tentatively known as the Tulsa Plan; per an article that ran last month in The Tulsa World, it "is being coordinated by TU and includes a leadership council with philanthropy, business, university, state, and nonprofit representation.... White males between the ages of 45 and 54 have seen huge increases in drug overdoses, suicide rates, and chronic liver diseases. Oklahoma ranks second in the nation in percentage of population with mental illness at 22.4 percent, and second in the nation in percent of population with substance abuse problems at 11.9 percent.... [This] state is 50th in the nation in adults who suffer from some form of mental illness, 47th in thoughts of suicide, 43rd in drug and alcohol abuse, and 46th in the nation on spending on mental health...." Dr. Clancy expands on these stats on our program, while also updating us on a similar data-driven effort that he and others began over a decade ago in this community. That 2005 effort was focused on reducing the life-expectancy gap between people in North Tulsa and those in South Tulsa; it resulted in a three-year increase in the expected lifespan of some 20,000 individuals in North Tulsa.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
Related Content