Terence McCormally, M.D., addresses medical students during National Primary Care Week on the MCV Campus last week.

Family medicine and climate change take center stage for National Primary Care Week

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As Terence McCormally, M.D., tells it, he learned to insert a chest tube and treat a dislocated elbow by looking at a medical book—in the treatment room with his patients. Those were the early days of his career when he was moonlighting as an emergency room doctor in an underserved community, he told an audience of medical students in the Hermes A. Kontos Medical Sciences Building last Friday during National Primary Care Week.

McCormally eventually would open a family medical practice with his wife in rural Iowa, doing a little bit of everything. “I was the county coroner, we were the board of health and we were the rescue squad.” Later in his career, he spent six months at a makeshift clinic months after Hurricane Katrina, cobbling together treatment plans from a box of donated medicine for patients with chronic illnesses.

Now a family doctor at Fairfax Family Practice and faculty member at the VCU Fairfax Department of Family Medicine, McCormally wasn’t trying to scare away future physicians with tales of his past experiences. He was just sharing the excitement and breadth of his 40-year career path as a family doctor.

There’s huge need for primary care nationwide, and so trying to get people interested in it and maintain interest is a big responsibility for us.

His talk capped a week of daily lunch lectures, all hosted by VCU’s Student Family Medicine Association (SFMA), to highlight the importance of primary care. SFMA Co-Presidents Adam Robinson and Michelle Wagner, both second-year medical students in the VCU School of Medicine, organized the events, which not only addressed the theme of climate change and its impact on health care but also served as inspirational talks meant to spur excitement in future clinicians about a career in family medicine.

“In the last few years, specialty medicine has become much more popular because of high reimbursement rates, and it’s also easier for a lot of physicians to do work at a major hospital, which primary care often isn’t as well set up to do,” Robinson said. “There’s huge need for primary care nationwide, and so trying to get people interested in it and maintain interest is a big responsibility for us.”

Medical schools across the country held events in celebration of National Primary Care Week. VCU, already a leader in primary care with two special tracks to encourage students to pursue family medicine, had particularly robust programming. In addition to the speaker roster, students participated in an osteopathic workshop and toured a VCU faculty member’s LEED-certified home. A volunteer trip to Shalom Farms was postponed due to rainy weather from Hurricane Joaquin.

Wagner and Robinson partnered with several VCU student interest groups, including those from pediatrics, internal medicine, geriatrics and the American Medical Student Association, to organize the proceedings. “Not to brag, but I would say that VCU student interest groups tend to more than pull their weight at all of these coordinated events,” Wagner said. “Our events are very well attended, very well run and everyone really bands together to do them.”

Each day, anywhere from 21 to 35 students stopped by various rooms around the VCU Health MCV Campus to listen to veterans of family medicine speak. What they heard was not only a lifetime of experience and more than a few teachable moments in patient care, but also the opportunity that family medicine represents to aspiring clinicians.

Incorporating the climate change theme gave students a forecast of what a modern career in family practice looks like. While social debate rages over the realities of global warming, both the large-scale disasters and daily, incremental effects of global warming are very real for family doctors, particularly those working in pediatric and geriatric care.

Speakers described young asthma patients suffering through longer pollen seasons, geriatric patients with multiple chronic conditions who are vulnerable to extreme temperature fluctuations, and—as in the case of McCormally—the experience of answering the call for emergency care during natural disasters created by a slowly warming planet.

 

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