Title: Attending Physician
Company: Scripps Health
Location: San Diego, CA, United States
John Randolph Swartz, MD, attending physician at Scripps Health, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Doctors and & Educators for dedication, achievements, and leadership in family medicine and psychiatry.
Dr. Swartz is a board-certified psychiatrist, family medicine provider, and professor with more than two decades as faculty at the Scripps Family Medicine Residency Program and others. His fascination with medicine began as a child, and by the time he got to college, earning a Bachelor of Arts in psychobiology at Rice University in 1985, Dr. Swartz wanted to explore the overlap between traditional medicine and mental health care. He completed his Doctor of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center in 1989 and pursued residencies in both psychiatry and family medicine at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, in the 1990s. His career was shaped by his work for the Valle de Paz Clinic in Belize, where he spent the majority of 1989 as a volunteer health care provider for a community of 3,000 Salvadoran Civil War refugees, an experience that awakened him to the possibilities for transformative and integrative medicine at a community level. Dr. Swartz began his career in 2000 as a locum tenens physician for the Rural Indian Health Service Hospital and Northern Navajo Medical Center in Shiprock, New Mexico, before accepting his current role as assistant director of the Scripps Family Medicine Residency Program at San Ysidro Health.
In addition to his work as director of the Scripps residency program, Dr. Swartz has also been a part-time member of faculty at the St. Vincent de Paul Village Medical Clinic and the UCSD Combined Family Medicine/Psychiatry Residency Program since 2002. He joined UC San Diego Health in 2004 as an associate clinical professor of family and preventive medicine, transitioning in 2019 to become a voluntary clinical professor in the medical center’s Department of Family Medicine and Public Health. In recognition of his dedication to his patients and discipline, Dr. Swartz has been the recipient of a 2001 mini-grant award from the UCSD Academic Geriatric Resource Center and a 2004 Outstanding Teaching Award from the UCSD Combined Family Medicine/Psychiatry Residency Program and was included in the Consumers Research Council of America Guide to America’s Top Doctors for three years in a row. Most recently, Dr. Swartz has been honored with a 2018 Excellence in Clinical Teaching and Patient Award from the Scripps Family Medicine Residency Program. He has contributed extensively to books, professional journals, and scientific conferences, and was selected as a delegate to the California Academy of Family Physicians in 2019 in addition to his service as past president and on the Board of Directors of the San Diego Academy of Family Physicians and as Chair of the Scripps Family Medicine Residency Program Evaluation Committee, among other responsibilities. Dr. Swartz attributes his success to having the curiosity and humility to keep growing as a provider and to the relationships he has built with patients and their families throughout the years. He remains active in the community, volunteering with the St. Vincent de Paul homeless shelter, and looks forward to continuing to strengthen and improve the Scripps residency program’s focus on geriatric medicine, an underserved area.
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