The first six recipients of DMU’s Rural Medicine Educational Pathway scholarship are flanked by Dana Shaffer, D.O., senior associate dean of clinical affairs, standing left, and David Plundo, D.O.’85, associate dean of medical education and external affairs, standing right: Seated from left are Brianna Jewell, Stacie Kasper and Katie Schell; standing are Eric Neverman, Eric Miller and Andrew Mueting.

With its Area Health Education Centers program and new rural medicine scholarship, DMU is bringing health care to underserved areas, today and for the future.

Katie Schell wants to practice in rural Iowa because of its growing need for health care providers. But she sees an additional attraction.

“In a small town, a physician is a pillar of the community,” says the Cascade, Iowa, native. “It’s a chance to serve on civic committees and the local school board and to be the doctor for the high school football team.”

Schell is one of six second-year osteopathic medicine students selected to receive the University’s new Rural Medicine Educational Pathway scholarship. Programs designed to lure health care workers to underserved areas aren’t new. But DMU’s creation of the rural medicine scholarship and its leadership in establishing Area Health Education Centers (AHECs) in Iowa give the state’s efforts a unique dimension.

Until 2007, Iowa was one of the last four states without an Area Health Education Center, or AHEC, a federally funded program created in 1972 to recruit, train and retain a health professions workforce committed to the underserved. That changed when DMU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine and the University of Iowa School of Nursing applied for and were awarded funds under the program.

Since then, DMU has established a program office and three of its four planned regional AHECs in Waterloo, Des Moines and Carroll. The centers are developing programs that teach children about health care careers, offer clinical training sites for health profession students and support health care practitioners with continuing education programs.

DMU took the effort a critical step further by creating its Rural Medicine Educational Pathway, which offers full-tuition scholarships to osteopathic medicine students who agree to practice primary care medicine in rural Iowa for at least four years after residency.

“The AHEC program is a long-term workforce development effort. But because DMU’s Rural Pathway program will place medical students and physicians in rural areas, we will see its impact right away,” says Wendy Gray, M.H.A.’97, AHEC program office director.

The six DMU students chosen for the rural medicine scholarship agree that bringing health care to a rural area benefits the overall community as well as its residents.

“One of my brothers once put a screw in his hand. My youngest brother has had three concussions and just broke his arm,” says Rural Pathway scholar Stacie Kasper, who grew up on a farm near Harper, Iowa. “My father had a disk come down on his foot, was trapped under a planter and once fell from a grain bin. A lot of different situations come up in rural areas.”

Learn about Des Moines University D.P.T. students working in rural areas.

D.P.T students Mia Krackow, Kristin Strong and Jessie Gress work with Angie Plager, the 2009 Ms. Wheelchair Iowa.

Everyone is smiling on this golf outing.

Wheelchair users just want to have fun–and golf and bicycle and bowl and go kayaking. When the Spinal Cord Injury Association of Iowa (SCIAI) offers those opportunities to people with mobility issues, DMU physical therapy and osteopathic medicine students often volunteer to help.

“I enjoy the game of golf, so I thought it would be a good way to get out and help,” says Mike Spicka, D.P.T.’11, who helped at a SCIAI golf clinic in July. “I really enjoyed my experience because I was able to talk with the participants about things besides why they were in physical therapy. I’ve been doing so much studying from books and lectures, I forgot that physical therapy is about connecting with people as well.”

D.P.T. student Michael Spicka, right, and another volunteer help a new golfer get into the swing.

Other DMU students agree the experiences benefit them as much as the participants. They gain a better understanding of conditions that affect mobility and hands-on experiences with individuals and adaptive equipment. “I had the opportunity to help an individual experience a new activity for the first time and got the chance to get to know her as well,” says Jessie Gress, D.P.T.’11, who helped Angie Plager, the 2009 Ms. Wheelchair Iowa, hold and swing a golf club. “She taught us about her disability and how she copes with it day to day.”

Gress and other DMU students challenged Plager to hit the ball farther; if she didn’t, she had to dance for the group, but if she made the goal, the students had to dance for her.

If our health care system were a patient, its care-givers would diagnose its problems, weigh solutions and prescribe treatment. We need to take that same team approach in “treating” the system. We need to define the relationship between good health care and good health. We need to engage patients and providers in optimizing health. And we need to treat dysfunctional incentives in the system that generate skyrocketing costs and poor health results.

For Providers

Back to Basics: Accessible, Coordinated, Evidence-Based Care

Before we implement a lot of new reforms, we need to get back to and improve a few fundamental principles. Giving more people access to primary-level health care is much more cost-effective than waiting until the problem has gone from something easily treatable to something requiring hospital and specialized care.

Secondly, although the days of the general practitioner taking care of his community from cradle to grave may be a thing of the past, the general principles behind such care shouldn’t be abandoned. Developing a system that tracks and reports a person’s tests, results and interactions with different practitioners would facilitate coordination of care.

Lastly, Americans with access to health care need to be more realistic in their expectations, and their care providers need to be more evidence-based in their approach. Those with coverage have become accustomed to having immediate access to high-level tests. We don’t tend to give the body time to do something it is often inherently capable of doing–to heal itself.

Jodi Cahalan, Ph.D., M.S.’93, M.P.H.’01, is dean of DMU’s College of Health Sciences.

Provide Carrots for Primary Care Physicians

The nation faces a critical shortage of primary care physicians, a shortfall that can only be remedied by medical schools convincing our graduates of the societal needs and rewards associated with careers in primary care. Without strong medical school leadership, long-term health care reform will never happen.

The shortage of primary care providers and those in some specialties, including general surgery, psychiatry and obstetric-gynecology, is not just about the total number being trained but equally about the mal-distribution. This can only be solved at the federal level, by paying providers more money to go to under-served areas or having mandatory service requirements for all students who receive federal loans.

Graduates could receive a lower interest rate (or none) on their loans to practice in a designated shortage area versus a significantly higher interest rate for those who practice in non-designated areas. Loan repayment and tax incentives also play potentially big roles. This is an area that obviously would be controversial, particularly for politicians trying to get re-elected, but we all need to be a part of the solution to our health care crisis.

Kendall Reed, D.O., FACOS, FACS, is dean of DMU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine and professor of surgery.

Give Providers, Students a Louder Voice

I would encourage health care providers and students pursuing a career in the health professions to work with their professional associations and legislators to identify the challenges they are currently facing or anticipate will occur that interfere with their ability to deliver quality cost-effective medical services. These are the individuals and groups that need to be heard more than other special interest groups who influence how medicine is practiced and how medical services are reimbursed.

If health care is a fundamental right for every American, then a hybrid health care system comprised of both private and governmental programs should coexist to meet this pledge. A framework for both is currently in place. Decision
-makers should work to correct the obscene inefficiencies within each of these systems that have contributed in making medicine a big business for non-medical personnel. Directing the majority of dollars directly to patient care rather than administrative bureaucracy will result in a higher probability of quality health care for all Americans while providing health care providers with fair and reasonable compensation.

Any change in health care delivery must empower patients and health care providers to make decisions through frank communication founded on evidence-based outcomes, costs, realistic expectations and the virtue of the health care provider/patient relationship. Doing what is best for the patient, without the influence of litigation lacking evidence of negligence, is critical to the success of health care reform.

R. Tim Yoho, D.P.M., FACFAS, is dean of DMU’s College of Podiatric Medicine and Surgery.

The state of our system

• Three out of every four dollars spent on health care are directly spent on treating chronic disease. Seven out of every 10 deaths in the U.S. are the direct result of chronic disease. (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
• The 2008 “America’s Health Rankings” reported the health of Americans had failed to improve for the fourth consecutive year, based on rising obesity, increasing number of uninsured people and persistence of risky health behaviors. Vermont led as the nation’s healthiest state in all factors; Louisiana replaced Mississippi as the least healthy state. (Source: United Health Foundation)
• The U.S. is the only advanced nation with a large fraction of its population uninsured, 46 million, or underinsured, 25 million. (Source: Council on Foreign Relations)
• National health spending is expected to exceed $2.5 trillion in 2009, accounting for 17.6 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). That’s more than $8,000 per every man, woman and child in the U.S. By 2018, national health care expenditures are expected to reach nearly $4.4 trillion–more than double 2007 spending. (Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services)
• The World Health Organization stated in 1946, “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
• In 2009, the average annual premium for a family using employer-sponsored health insurance is $13,375, a 131 percent increase from 1999. On average, covered workers contribute 27 percent of the total premium for family coverage. (Source: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation)
• The U.S. spends 44 percent more per capita than Switzerland, the country with the second highest expenditures. (Source: Council on Foreign Relations)
• A 2009 study by the nonprofit Research Triangle Institute reported that medical spending averages $1,400 more a year for an obese person than for someone who’s normal weight. Overall obesity-related health spending totals $147 billion, 9.1 percent of all medical spending and double what it was nearly a decade ago.
• Obesity in American adults has increased by 60 percent within the past 20 years; obesity in children has tripled in the past 30 years. One-third of American adults are obese, and obesity-related deaths have climbed to more than 300,000 a year, second only to tobacco-related deaths. (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
• In just three years, the Medicare and Medicaid programs will account for 50 percent of all national health spending.
• A study reported in the American Journal of Medicine found that 62 percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were linked to medical expenses. Of those who filed for bankruptcy, nearly 80 percent had health insurance.

William Anderson giving the DMU Commencement Address on May 23, 2009

Never quit: Denied admission to numerous medical schools, he served as a hospital corpsman during World War II, learned mortuary science and enrolled at Des Moines Still College of Osteopathy and Surgery (now DMU).

Never quit: Refusing to back down Anderson and his wife, Norma, became early leaders in the civil rights movement along with their friend Martin Luther King Jr.

Never quit: At a time when even white D.O.s faced professional discrimination, Anderson rose to the top, advocating for his profession and other African-American physicians.

DMU College of Osteopathic Medicine Dean Kendall Reed, Dr. Anderson and DMU President Terry Branstad stand by the plaques honoring Pioneer Award recipients.

Anderson’s life embodies another theme of his May commencement address to DMU graduates: Take what life hands you and make the most of it.

Anderson’s hard work and fearless leadership broke barriers in his profession and across society. That’s why DMU honored him as a Pioneer in Osteopathic Medicine and Public Service this year.

“I’ve had many doors closed in my face, so I found ways to make other doors open,” says Anderson, now vice president for academic affairs in osteopathic medical education at Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit. “Nothing is impossible if you don’t give up on your dreams.”

Fighting for civil rights

Anderson established his first practice in Albany, Ga., upstairs from a pool hall and liquor store.

“Almost from the first day I had an office full of patients–on some days as many as one hundred,” he recalled in the book he and Norma co-wrote, Autobiographies of a Black Couple of the Greatest Generation. He also made house calls, including to homes without electricity, indoor plumbing or heat. On occasion he delivered babies by driving his car up to a house’s window with its headlights on to allow him to see.

William Anderson, center, welcomes King and Abernathy to his Georgia home in 1961.

He and Norma also began forming an organization to end segregation in the city. At the group’s first meeting on Nov. 17, 1961, those gathered named themselves the Albany Movement and then elected Anderson its first president. Less than a month later, when hundreds of peaceful demonstrators–including both Andersons–were being arrested, the couple convinced Norma’s childhood neighbor, Dr. King, and his co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph David Abernathy, to come to Albany. Hundreds of people from across southwest Georgia flocked to the city to see and march with the civil rights leaders.

The movement continued in 1962 with organized boycotts of city buses and downtown stores. In January, Anderson, King and Abernathy were in jail again after a demonstration, on a day when King was scheduled to be on the NBC TV program “Meet the Press.” He wanted to remain in jail, but Police Chief Laurie Pritchett wanted to avoid drawing even more negative publicity upon the city. So the three jailed men drew straws, and Anderson went to New York City to appear on the program.

When program panelist James Kilpatrick, then editor of the Richmond (Va.) News Leader and a once-fervent segregationist, accused Anderson and King of inviting arrest “as a matter of showmanship,” Anderson retorted, “If exercising a constitutionally guaranteed right is inviting arrest, yes, we invited arrest.”

Anderson wrote that the Albany Movement was important because of how it changed perceptions: African-Americans “discovered that they had the power to effect change and could do it nonviolently,” and whites “came to the realization that Blacks were not happy and content with things as they were and were not going to accept it anymore.”

The movement also influenced subsequent civil rights movements throughout the United States. In the forward of Autobiographies, fellow civil rights leader Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker stated, “William and Norma Anderson were the heart and breadth of the Albany Movement. It was the Albany Movement that laid the foundation of the historic Birmingham campaign. It was in Albany that the movement developed the skills to mobilize an entire city for an assault on segregation and injustices.”

A professional pioneer, too

In 1963, Anderson decided to renew his studies to become a surgeon. DMU classmate and Detroit physician Charles Murphy, D.O.’57, helped him get accepted as house physician at the city’s Art Centre hospital. Anderson eventually got a surgical residency there, becoming the first black person to receive such an appointment at any Detroit hospital. He went on to become the hospital’s first black chief of staff and chairman of the board of the hospital corporation.

Anderson also was the first African-American certified by the American College of Osteopathic Surgeons and the first to serve as president of the American Osteopathic Association. In 1973 he became the first black person to serve on the DMU Board of Trustees. “You have assumed the role of leaders by earning your degrees,” Anderson reminded DMU graduates at commencement. “You have inherited the earth. What will you do with that inheritance?”

As a pre-med major at Arizona State University, Dan Deublein hadn’t given acting a second thought since his nonspeaking role in “Oliver” in the sixth grade. That changed when an agent in Phoenix approached the Alec Baldwin lookalike with the question, “Have you ever thought about acting?”

Deublein landed two auditions for commercials in a week and, to his surprise, booked both.

Deublein switched his major to theater arts and booked more commercials. Despite being “terrified” by Shakespeare, he landed the role of romantic lead Petruchio in a campus production of “The Taming of the Shrew.” His performance won him a Maxie Award, an area honor recognizing achievement in university and professional theater.

After graduating, Deublein moved to Los Angeles. He eventually landed roles in lower-budget movies, on the soap opera “General Hospital” and then on its spin-off, “Port Charles.” Soon he was playing Ben Swift, accountant for actor Luke Perry, on Fox TV’s hit prime-time drama about wealthy teens, “Beverly Hills 90210.”

The show was both the height of Deublein’s acting career and the beginning of its end.

Deublein became director of operations for a friend’s post-production studio, earned his license as an emergency medical technician and volunteered as a ski patroller at a nearby resort.

That literal downhill trajectory in his career put him on a new path. Every incident involved trauma and often broken bones, including one man’s fractured femur that Deublein set with two skis. “It was intense training, but I loved helping people,” he says. “Plus the work felt important–not like acting.”

By then married, he also was drawn to textbooks his wife, Lauree, was studying to get into nursing. Eventually they moved to Des Moines, Lauree’s hometown and location of DMU’s physician assistant program.

Deublein began making connections. He contacted the president of the Iowa Physician Assistant Society, Jolene Kelly, M.S., PA-C, a DMU faculty member and now director of the PA program.

Not exactly Hollywood: Dan Deublein helps others during a DMU medical service trip.

Interested in global health, Deublein–not yet enrolled at DMU–contacted Yogesh Shah, M.D., of DMU’s global health program. The University was organizing its first trip to Belize, Central America, so Deublein and his wife paid their own way to go.

He went on DMU’s medical service trip to El Salvador in March, is philanthropy chair for his class and is working to launch an organization, PAs Unite, to create more global health opportunities for PAs.

“I feel incredibly lucky to be here. PAs have such diverse backgrounds, but I feel they’re all in it for the right reasons.They want to treat patients,” he says. “I’m a theater major surrounded by biochemistry majors. I’m very thankful the program sees people’s diversities for what they are and accepts them.”

With his impressive resume, Martin Diamond, D.O.’62, would have been entitled to decline an invitation to help fulfill a vision both ambitious and complex. But it was that resume and his advocacy for the underserved that made him ideal for the job: to help establish and lead the first medical school in New York state in 30 years–in the heart of Harlem.

“Our mission is to increase under-represented minorities in medicine and to attract people who want to serve underserved communities,” says Diamond, the school’s founding dean. “Plus there had never been a medical school in Harlem.”

The new Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine–part of an extensive network of Touro colleges and schools around the world– welcomed its first class on Sept. 4, 2007, in the former Blumstein’s department store. Now students fill its classrooms, laboratories and clinical training areas. The fact the college was but a dream of Touro leaders barely four years ago says a lot about Diamond’s leadership and experience.

“I personally believe we achieved our goal because of Martin Diamond and his relationships,” says Dr. Jay Sexter, chief executive officer of the new college.

Attending the announcement of the new medical school in 2007 were Jay Sexter, Touro COM CEO; Kenneth Knuckles, president and CEO, Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone; then- lieutenant governor and now New York Gov. David Paterson; Martin Diamond, D.O.’62; founding Touro College President Bernard Lander; Daniel Laroche, president, Empire State Medical Association; and Sheldon Sirota, Touro College vice president for osteopathic medicine.

That’s a reflection, in part, of Diamond’s years of service on boards of the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, the New York State Board for Medicine, the New York State Osteopathic Medical Society and the American Osteopathic Association, to name a few. He served as an associate dean at both the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine and the Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Vallejo, Calif., along with maintaining an active family practice.

Diamond credits his distinguished career in large part with his enrolling at DMU–then the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery–as “probably the best decision of my life.”

“Had I gone into allopathic medicine, I never would have had the interesting career I’ve had, never would have been exposed to the exciting experiences I’ve had,” says Diamond, past member and president of DMU’s National Alumni Association of the College of Osteopathic Medicine.

The new school took over the historic Blumstein's department store in Harlem.

Diamond also has a passion for serving the underserved and the discriminated. A Jew who grew up in a black neighborhood in New York City, he experienced anti-Semitism while in the Navy. “I’ve been a minority my whole life,” he says.

That’s one reason Diamond wanted the new medical college to be in an area with very few practicing physicians. That also was a reason some people thought the idea was crazy.

Last year, in its second year of accepting students, Touro COM received 3,400 applications for 125 slots. Diamond became dean emeritus last July, but he continues to work with its administrators and faculty. He also tries to meet every student. “I don’t know what I’ll be doing next July,” he says, “but I doubt I will be retired.”

While interviewing for general surgery residencies, Zach Bauman, D.O.’09, was shocked when female candidates were asked whether they were married and planned to have children in the next five years–“illegal” questions he was never asked.

Valerie Vote Castle, D.O.’01, an Air Force physician stationed in Japan, struggled to understand her male supervisor’s leadership style in an attempt to “ease the tension” at their workplace.

These experiences led Bauman and Castle to take a new online course that explores the role of gender in health care leadership. Two factors led F.R. “Fritz” Nordengren, M.P.H., and Ann York, Ph.D., faculty in DMU’s health care administration and public health programs, to create the course: First, the college’s dean, associate dean and five program directors are all women, which is unusual in academia and particularly among medical schools; second, students increasingly represent different generations and cultures, giving them varying views on gender roles.

“Understanding gender and leadership models is important because we’re preparing leadership in health care. Students recognize there are gender-related issues in the industry,” says Nordengren.

“We began with the question, ‘Do men and women lead differently?’ York says. “We tried to keep a balance between both genders–we did not have a gender agenda going into the course.”

Instead, she and Nordengren took an evidence-based approach requiring students to locate and appraise research and literature on four central questions: the impact of family responsibilities on gender and leadership; whether leaders are born or made; whether gender leadership differences are based on discrimination or choice; and whether men and women lead differently.

Finding literature was a challenge, Castle says. “What surprised me was the vast amount of literature on leadership issues and gender roles in business, but not in leadership of medicine,” she says. “We have to know the best types of leadership to make a new health care model succeed.”

The 11 students in the course–six women and five men in their 20s to 50s in the United States, Japan and India–also were challenged to understand their own gender, cultural and generational biases and assumptions.

“I really thought my generation was going to change things, making opportunities more equal,” says Bauman, now a general surgery resident in Detroit. “But women are still facing issues they faced back in the ’50s and ’60s.”

Men face issues, too, say York and Nordengren. For example, the desire among young fathers to spend more time with their children than their fathers did may mean they’re not as willing or able to put in long hours on the job. Issues of bullying and mentoring also vary among men and women.

“The glass ceiling has been fractured for some time. Achieving leadership roles is more of a labyrinth,” York says. “But there are separate labyrinths for men and women, and navigating them remains confusing.”

York and Nordengren gave a presentation on the role of gender in health care leadership at an Association of University Programs in Healthcare Administration conference in July. They plan to offer the course–part of the CHS Health Care Leadership Certificate Program–again next spring, and they’re exploring the idea of a statewide conference on the topic.

The genders, they are a’changin’…sort of

• For every hour a man spends with children, a woman spends 2.1 hours. However, the amount of time fathers spend with their children under age 13 on workdays has increased from two hours in 1977 to three hours in 2008.
• 78 percent of the health care workforce is composed of women.
• Women under age 29, both with and without children, are as likely as men to want jobs with greater responsibility.
• In 1975, 47 percent of mothers with children under age 18 participated in the labor force; by 2007, that proportion had risen to 71 percent.
• By 2007, the average full-time employed woman earned 80 percent of what men earned on a weekly basis.

Sources: Families and Work Institute and American College of Healthcare Executives

Do gender roles affect you in your workplace? Do you want to explore ideas on managing the effect of gender in health care? DMU faculty Ann York and F.R. “Fritz” Nordengren encourage you to contact them if you are interested in their gender roles course, related research or a possible conference on the topic. E-mail them at ann.york@dmu.edu and fritz.nordengren@dmu.edu.

Job description: Small town family physician, involved in hospital care, EMS, OB, sports medicine, geriatrics and the county medical examiner.

Background: I was born in Monticello, Iowa, and attended primary school there. I completed my undergrad at the University of Dubuque then medical school at Des Moines University and an internship at Des Moines General. My family includes wife, Julie, five sons, three daughters-in-law and two grandchildren.

Why I chose to be a part of DMU’s global health trip: I was following in my son Jonathan’s, (DMU D.P.M. ’11), footsteps, who had gone on an earlier DMU medical mission. I had planned on doing medical mission for quite a while and this was the best option.

What I enjoyed most about being a part of the global health trip: Working with other providers and students interested in relieving pain and suffering for very grateful people.

Why I would encourage other alumni to get involved in global health with DMU: It reminds you of the basic reason you entered medicine, renews the vitality of it and gives you faith in the future of medicine when given the opportunity to work with the bright, hardworking health care providers of tomorrow.

Advice to those considering a global health adventure: Prepare to see a very different world and yet have much in common with those you care for.

What I learned from my global health experience: The need is tremendous and we have been given so much. Doing something is better than doing nothing.

Interested? To learn more about global health opportunities contact nicholas.schmit@dmu.edu, call 515-271-1573 or visit www.dmu.edu/globalhealth.

Military medics practice triage in the simulation lab at DMU. Photo by Sergeant Shelaine Harbart

Local medics practice at DMU’s Iowa Simulation Center.

Oh, my leg! My leg! My buddy needs help. I’ve got to help him. Help me up. I’ve got to help him!”

Master Sergeant Jeff Lindsey from Moberly, Mo., clutched a bloody splinter of bone protruding from his thigh. A medic tried to calm him as Lindsey struggled to stand, intent on helping a fellow Army reservist lying prone with a severe head wound.

This was the scene not on a battlefield but in DMU’s Iowa Simulation Center for Patient Safety and Clinical Skills on a July weekend, when 25 medics from the 4224th Army Hospital, based at Fort Des Moines, took part in triage training on campus. Lindsey and his comrades were adorned with realistic rubber “wounds” in a scenario designed to enable medics to practice determining which soldiers were most seriously wounded, treatable or able to wait while others received care.

“Your job as a U.S. Army hospital medic is to work in a hospital,” Lindsey explained to the other participants, “but you also may be deployed as an individual medic with a unit. So you need to be ready for both scenarios.”

The simulation lab and its lifelike medical mannequins and other equipment provided an ideal environment for the medics to get ready. “I was very impressed by the tools that were made available to us and believe they will enhance our training,” says Lindsey.

“The exercise was part of DMU’s ongoing commitment to help train Army, Army Reserve and National Guard medics and nurses, as well as students and civilian health care providers. Simulation lab users gain skills in diagnosis, treatment and teamwork.

Michael Flood, D.O., explains aspects of a medical mannequin. Photo by Sergeant Shelaine Harbart

“We want this center to be a resource for the community and the military,” says Michael Flood, D.O.’77, center chairman and DMU associate professor. “This is the future of medical education. It’s the best thing that’s happened in medical education since we put computers in the classroom.”

Working with military medics benefits DMU, too. “I’ve learned a lot from watching the medics and how they work together,” Flood says. “I’ll be able to take that back to our students.”

Being followed around at work, explaining everything you do, getting your colleagues to pitch in–is letting a DMU student job-shadow you worth it?

“I would do it again in a heartbeat,” says Lisa Rechkemmer, D.P.M.’92, FACFAS, a podiatric physician with two offices in the Chicago area. “It was energizing both for me and my staff.”

It also benefited Kathryn Jenewein, the second-year DMU podiatric student who shadowed Rechkemmer. “I saw so much variety among patients,” she says. “After my first year with all that studying, the job-shadow experience made me excited about podiatry again.”

Visiting the two offices a couple of days a week, Jenewein observed procedures and the practice’s advanced technology for fitting orthotics. Rechkemmer reviewed patients’ pre- and post-treatment X-rays with her to deepen her understanding. “It was great she took the time to get out those pre-surgery radiographs for me,” Jenewein says.

She also enjoyed interacting with staff and patients who “obviously thought very highly of Dr. Rechkemmer.” The feeling was mutual.

“Patients loved seeing a young person just getting into medicine,” Rechkemmer says.

For the physician, the experience reminded her of the challenges of medical school while she helped Jenewein “see what lies ahead.”

“I encourage alumni to mentor students, because it’s a great way to reconnect with DMU,” she says. “It really doesn’t take much time out of your day. And what you get back is so much more than the time you put into it.”

Want to make a meaningful difference to a future fellow DMU grad and member of your profession? Your perspective and personal contact with a DMU student will be a valuable experience that will enhance his/her education at DMU. Students will look to their mentors to advise them on clinical rotations, post-graduate training or practice opportunities.

A mentor may be contacted depending on the student’s interest in location and/or specialty.

Become a mentor today by visiting www.dmu.edu/alumni or contacting the alumni relations office at 515-271-1463.