The Power of Finding Common Journeys Between You and Your Patients

For my entire career my patients’ stories had shaped my academic journey—from my decision to specialize in endocrinology and diabetes to my decision to focus a significant portion of my scholarly work on studying mental health complications of diabetes, with a specific focus on understanding the biological and behavioral determinants of the depression-diabetes association.

Over time, however, I began to realize that my own personal story and journey outside of medicine was equally formative in shaping the person, physician-scientist, and leader that I would become.

On April 27, 2015, the day of the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore, Maryland—my academic and personal journeys powerfully intersected.

Following the riots, Johns Hopkins Dean Paul Rothman, MD, challenged all Department Directors in the School of Medicine to respond to the riots by developing programs to enhance engagement of our academic units with the surrounding community. In the Department of Medicine, we were inspired to develop an impactful discussion program that would spark greater communication, understanding, and engagement among our departmental employees at all levels. I realized that my own personal journey had some very unique features that prior to April 2015 I had not had the opportunity nor comfort to share with my colleagues at Johns Hopkins.

My maternal grandmother left Central Virginia as a 13-year-old girl with an 8th grade education and settled in the Washington, DC area because there were not opportunities to advance for African Americans in the South. Her tenacity paid off when I attended and graduated from the University of Virginia School of Medicine—an environment that welcomed me with open arms but had rejected my grandmother in the 1920s.

Despite these achievements, the Freddie Gray riots resurrected concerns that I share with fellow African-American women who live in Baltimore City and were directly impacted by the riots. Many of these women are my patients as well as frontline staff who work in our Department. I worry that my teenage son will be pulled over by the police and treated harshly. I worry that my husband, a neonatologist who often has to travel to the hospital in the middle of the night to care for sick newborns, will be pulled over as well. These are some of the issues that were keeping me awake at night.

The Department of Medicine established a five-part lecture series—Journeys in Medicine—(1) to explore how race and background inform our worldview and relationships and (2) to strategize and develop approaches to improving our environment, building a culture of respect, and improving our community. This series formed the foundation for a department-wide Civic Engagement Initiative that launched a year later in July 2016, summarized in our recent Academic Medicine publication.

Our patients are deeply impacted by their community experiences outside of the healthcare setting. As physicians it is imperative that we lead by example in understanding our patients’ social challenges so that we can more comprehensively address their medical issues by treating the “whole person” and not just the disease.

Instead of remaining comfortable in our ivory towers, we must step out of our comfort zones and engage with our patients and staff in their communities to build greater trust and empathy. We now have physicians, nurses, administrators, and staff actively engaged in the communities surrounding the Johns Hopkins academic campuses so that we can fulfill our tripartite mission with greater compassion, insight, and vigor!