From a position on the faculty of Harvard Medical School you jumped to an experimental OB/GYN practice for under-served residents of San Diego County. There you chose the patients no one else wanted and designed for them a system of private care that could survive at Medicaid levels of funding. The county faced a growing number of poor women who showed up at emergency rooms to deliver their babies, having had no prenatal care. Many considered this problem unsolvable. But using analytical skills we like to think you developed at Williams, you identified the barriers that kept these women from seeking care-they involved transportation, social, educational issues and figured out how to overcome them. As the number of your patients grew, the number of no care pregnancies in the county dropped, astoundingly, to near zero. At the same time you volunteered to become an HIV specialist on your own time at no pay. The result was an increased ability to deliver virus free babies from HIV-positive women. Drawing on earlier experience in Eastern Europe and Micronesia, you have now taken your new knowledge and skills to South Africa, serving the most vulnerable and neglected women and children in a country being devoured by this disease . There you again quickly ascertained the barriers to care and how to remove them and have trained others in the spread of this care across that nation’s health system. The centerpiece is a program that enables HIV positive mothers to mentor and counsel pregnant women who have the virus. Across the country babies are being born healthy who would have died without you. For all this work you are unpaid. Instead, every few months you fly to New York and cover rounds for a short time to support your mission and your family. A South African colleague reports that you are an inspiration to those you work with there as you are, indeed, to us all.
Megamenu Social