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What an exciting time to become president of the Dallas County Medical Society! In the past few months, the DCMS Board of Health, chaired by Dr David Vanderpool, has done a truly spectacular job of educating us about bioterrorism. The board educated not only the members of DCMS, but also the news media and local hospitals. It did such a good job that the media was calling us to check out the latest rumors, rather than us calling them. It is a testament to Gordon Green’s foresight in creating the Board of Health and to the insight of the members of the Board that its first action item was a plan for how our medical community could respond to an act of bioterrorism. It was no accident that its plans had been worked out long before the events of Sept 11 and the anthrax scare that followed. This year, Project Access, a program for providing volunteer care for the working poor, will launch its pilot program. Project Access is modeled after a program that is successful in other cities. It will screen and enroll patients who have a job but can’t afford health insurance. Physicians who would like to do some charity care, but who can’t afford time to spend a half day per month at a free clinic, will be able to volunteer to see a preset number of patients per month in their office. A separate arm of the program will provide the prescriptions these patients otherwise would not be able to afford. Under the guidance of the DCMS Board of Directors during the terms of Presidents Fred Ciarochi and Carolyn Evans, Dr James Walton has worked nearly full time to organize this project. In a bit of wizardry that would put Harry Potter to shame, the DCMS staff submitted a federal grant request almost overnight. We now are receiving that grant money to launch Project Access. I feel very fortunate to be serving as your president in such exciting times! Many people in this room have taught me a lot about leadership in DCMS over the years. During my first term on the board of directors, I had the privilege of learning from the expert leadership of Presidents Richard Joseph, Barry Uhr, and Luis Lieb, and Executive Officer Bob Heath. My friends Dr Rob Tenery and Dr Roland Black also have served as presidents of our society, and I have admired their hard work. After four years of working on the Physicians’ Recovery Committee, I had the opportunity of being back on the board of directors this past year, learning from the leadership of President Carolyn Evans and Past President Fred Ciarochi, and from Executive Vice President Michael Darrouzet and Chief Operating Officer Bonnie Weikel. I also got to see Dr Jerry Sudderth in action on the Membership Committee, and Dr David Vanderpool on the Board of Health. I have been fortunate to observe and learn from all these leaders. No one in my family was a physician, but at the ripe old age of eight, I decided that I wanted to be one. At 11, I decided I wanted to be a medical missionary. Fortunately, my aptitude in science allowed me to pursue my dream of becoming a doctor. My plans for becoming a medical missionary started showing signs of problems when I talked to my pediatrics professor at Galveston about whether becoming a pediatric surgeon might be useful for becoming a medical missionary. He bluntly told me that if I wanted to become a medical missionary, I ought to go into the field of public health, rather than surgery. During the last six weeks of medical school, I visited the Presbyterian missions in Zaire. Indeed, most of the patients needed medical treatment rather than surgery. The primitive conditions under which medical practice was carried out at these remote mission hospitals were far removed from what I was learning in medical school. During my year in Vietnam as a battalion surgeon and regimental surgeon, I saw how limited a job I was able to do with the same limited lab support that would be available in the mission hospitals, namely a hematocrit, a malaria smear, and a chest X-ray. As I pursued my training in surgery, it became progressively more apparent that I would not be able to do many of the things I was learning in my training if I went to the mission field. When my second daughter, Alison, was born, the obstetrician initially was unable to deliver her because of a shoulder dystocia and, in a panic, sent me out of the delivery room. Although Alison survived with only a transient Erb’s palsy, it was obvious to me that had I been delivering her myself at a mission hospital, she would have died. So I decided that that was the reason the Lord had led me away from my childhood ambition of being a medical missionary. I have been asked what my “agenda” is for my year
as president. My agenda is to carry on the good works that have
been started with the Board of Health and Project Access, to
encourage and support the good work of our committees and our
delegation to the TMA, and to look for any opportunity to do
something positive for the physicians of Dallas County and our
patients. I look forward to working closely with Joanne Fay and
the DCMS Alliance in supporting their activities as they have
worked so hard supporting our activities over the years. I ask
for the help and support of everyone here to accomplish those
goals. If you know of a way DCMS can do a better job of helping
our physicians and our patients, please share it with me.
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