CIR Alumni Put Their Idealism to Work
Drs.Anje van Berckelaer and Ira Nemeth were activists during their residency – she as CIR co-president at Harbor-UCLA, and he as a CIR regional vice president from New York. So it was no surprise that their engagement with the world would continue when residency was done.
For Dr. van Berckelaer, that meant a volunteer stint with Doctors without Borders in Niger and in the Central African Republic (CAR). For Dr.Nemeth, it was beginning a fellowship in Disaster Management in Dallas just two months before Hurricane Katrina hit. He is now Dallas County’s Public Health Preparedness Medical Director. They shared their experiences with CIR News recently.
DR. ANJE VAN BERCKELAER: "It was an eye-opening experience.Working in an L.A.County hospital you see a lot of poverty and social challenges, but there’s just no comparison. We ran outpatient feeding centers [in Niger] five days a week, each day in a different site located near a village with a high percentage of malnourished children...There are tens of thousands of malnourished kids, and simple interventions make a huge difference. We treated them with therapeutic food, which is a peanut butter paste, heavily enriched with milk powder, sugar, vitamins and minerals.
"In CAR, we treated some malnourished children, and also worked in a rural general hospital in a conflict situation. My role was to ensure the quality of medical care with four doctors and 35 nurses.
"Doctors without Borders is mostly funded by small contributors like you and me. The organization’s principles of neutrality help maintain safety for volunteers. There’s a tremendous amount of satisfaction from seeing ...these very sick kids get well. The teamwork was a tremendously invigorating part of it, too. I worked with many clinicians who are exceptionally skilled, and learned a lot from them. And you live with your teammates, so it’s more than a job."
Dr. van Berckelaer has started a fellowship at the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program in health policy research, but says she "hopes to do this again someday,maybe at the end of my career."
DR. IRA NEMETH: "Relief work is rewarding in lots of different ways. You’re providing care in situations where it’s difficult to get things done. You have to establish a whole new pathway that’s not ordinarily set up, and the ability to coordinate that is amazing — to let people who want to see patients do that, and if it’s at a convention center, to establish a new healthcare clinic in a day, in a place that’s never had one. You have to have the pieces pre-understood, where supplies will be stored, the connections to pharmacies must already be made, so when you tell them you want to begin tomorrow, you can."
Dr. Nemeth has since worked on Hurricane Gustav and Ike, but Katrina was the biggest, with 30,000 evacuees.
"We set up a clinic with 9,000 visits in a three week period. It was a total immersion. It definitely showed me what is possible. I figured I would be doing some basic training first, but t
he practical piece happened so soon. I felt, now that I’ve seen it, how do you make it better for the next time? That’s been my impetus ever since. I’m definitely of the opinion that there will be more disasters in the future due to global warming, and raising preparedness is my goal.
"I think this will always be a part of what I do, but I also want to keep a hand in the healthcare system, so I still work shifts in the Emergency Department. It’s probably as many hours as residency was, but not all concentrated in one area – it crosses over into surgery, administrative discussions, planning meetings, so it keeps things varied. It’s a great mix."