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Dr. Gurpreet K. Padam

Treasurer, Co-founder

Dr. Gurpreet K. Padam, MD, FAAFP, DipABLM

In 2009, Dr. Padam founded a free clinic for the uninsured, which as of 2014 was established as the Guru Nanak Free Medical Clinic in San Jose, California.   The clinic is now staffed and managed by multi-lingual volunteer physicians from the community to aid those in need or those who do not have medical insurance.   While seeing patients in the clinic, she and her colleagues identified a number of unaddressed issues, including domestic violence, lack of resources, and lack of social, language, and culture-specific support in the Sikh community.   To help promote healthy families in the Sikh American community by closing current gaps in access to multi-lingual resources and increasing community awareness through health education, raising chronic illness awareness, and advocating for physical and mental health.   Sikh Family Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit was formed as a grassroots community-based organization.

Dr. Padam has served as a member of the Board of Directors for several healthcare organizations at the local, county, and state-level advocating for healthcare legislation, bridging health care disparities, improving access to care, and providing free health care for the most vulnerable members of society.  She contributes to medical humanities writing as a means to champion physician wellness and highlighting the tenderness of the physician-patient relationship. Dr. Padam is board-certified Family Medicine physician and Lifestyle Medicine sub-specialist .  She is fellowship trained in Hospice and Palliative Medicine from Stanford/VA Palo Alto and with a mini-fellowship in Ethno-Geriatrics from the Stanford Geriatric Education Center.  Her special interest includes understanding the unique cultural and linguistic barriers to the delivery of culturally literate medicine to multi-ethnic patients and families and other social determinants of healthcare disparities. She has extensive experience in ensuring that our community has critical health information that is communicated with attention to Gurmat mindfulness and cultural as well as linguistic context. She has been working alongside numerous clinicians, community members and leaders from across the United States and Canada to lead the North American Sikh Medical and Dental Association’s (NASMDA) COVID-19 Response Team since the beginning of the pandemic.