KERR L. WHITE

WHITE Dr. KERR LACHLAN WHITE Kerr Lachlan White died on July 22, 2014, at Westminister Canterbury of the Blue Ridge. He had lived in the Charlottesville area since 1984 following retirement from the Rockefeller Foundation. Prior to that he had been professor and founding chair of what is now the Department of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins University. Educated in economics and medicine at McGill University, Montreal, he completed graduate work in economics at Yale University and in statistics and epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He trained in internal medicine at Dartmouth's Hitchcock Clinic and Hospital and the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. For almost ten years he taught, practiced and conducted research in the Department of Medicine at the University of North Carolina with special emphasis on primary medical care, a term he and colleagues introduced in 1961. For some fifty years as an originator of what became known as Health Services Research, White investigated the problems of organizing, managing, financing, and evaluating health services in the United States and abroad. Many graduates of his department are now leaders in this field. The application of epidemiological and statistical concepts to understanding these problems was a continuing commitment, as was his deep concern with the influence of emotional and social factors on health, disease and treatments of all modalities. While at the Rockefeller Foundation White was responsible for establishing the International Clinical Epidemiology Network (INCLEN) with five sites in the United States, Canada and Australia that to date have trained over 1,400 young medical school faculty who now staff Clinical Research Units in over 80 medical schools in 33 countries including sites in Africa, China, Europe, India, Latin America and Southeast Asia. From 1963 to 1976 he chaired the seven-country World Health Organization International Collaborative Study of Medical Care Utilization. White was a trustee of Case Western Reserve University and the Foundation for Child Development and a member of the Technical Board of the Milbank Memorial Fund, the Visiting Committee of the Harvard School of Public Health and the Advisory Committees on Population Health of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and on Medical Research of the Pan American Health Organization. He was a long-time member as well as Council Member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and a council member and president of the International Epidemiological Association. He was a chair of the U.S. National Committee on Health and Vital Statistics where he was instrumental in several initiatives including the annual publication of Health: United States and the on-going National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. He chaired the NIH Health Services Research Study Section and the President's Science Advisory Committee's Panel on Health Services Research. He served on the editorial boards of Medical Care, the International Journal of Health Services and Inquiry and was instrumental in founding the journal Health Services Research. Over the years, he was a consultant to the World Health Organization, UNICEF, UNDP, the World Bank, and national and provincial governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the People's Republic of China. He was the author or co-author of 250 publications, including ten books, in the fields of epidemiology, health services, health statistics, primary care, public health and medical education. White received numerous domestic and foreign honors, fellowships, and degrees. His extensive collection of books, reports, manuscripts and related matters is housed as a special Health Care Collection in the Historical Division of the University of Virginia's Health Sciences Library and is accessible on the Internet. White was born in Winnipeg on January 23, 1917 and grew up in Ottawa, Canada. He is survived by his daughters, Susan of Charlottesville and Margot, of Los Angeles, California and his grandson, Jason, also of Los Angeles, California. His wife, Isabel, died in 2000, a brother, Ian P. Stevenson, died in 2007 and a sister, Edith Meisner died in 2011. Services will be private. Those desiring to do so may send a donation to Region Ten, 800 Preston Avenue, Charlottesville, VA 22903. Friends may sign the guestbook at teaguefuneralhome.com