Ingram's October 2022

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GURPREET GANDHOKE Saint Luke’s Hospital/Saint Luke’s Health System It’s a request that would be tough for anyone to ignore: On her deathbed, Gurpreet Gandhoke’s grandmother left him with a final regret—she wouldn’t live long enough to see a stetho scope around his neck. “I was very close to her,” he remembers, “and I said, ‘This is it: This is what I will do with my life.’” From his roots in India, he made his way through medical school fo cused, on becoming a neurosurgeon, and charted his final stag es of training through residency, including a stop in the U.S. It would be a brief one because he had a job guaranteed to him in India. “A mentor told me that before I start earning money, I should go to the U.S. for a month, then come back.” In the States, though, Gandhoke started working on the math. India had a population-to-neurosurgeon ratio of roughly 1 million to

JENNIFER GOLDMAN Children’s Mercy Kansas City

Jennifer Goldman’s grandfather was a radiologist, but she never got to meet him—he died before she was born. His influ ence touched her nevertheless; she says: “I grew up hearing wonderful stories about his life as a physician.” Those stories would form a backdrop years later after she finished college and was still unsure about a career path. Two years in the Peace Corps, reinforcing her love for learning about different

cultures, exposed her to health care instruction in Cameroon, helping villagers learn about vaccinations and the need for clean water. Back in the states, she worked with the Arthritis Foundation in New York, de veloping community-based ex ercise programs. “My favorite part of that job was listening to a doctor who volunteered once a week,” Goldman says, and as that rheumatologist dealt with questions from patients, she

one. In the U.S., it was closer to 65,000 to one. That calculation, and the factor we think of as the Kansas City Hook, grabbed him after he finished his neurosur gery training in Pittsburgh. In stead of a year or two stateside, he said he and his family had reached a conclusion: It would be better to raise their daughter here. He had seen San Francis co, Phoenix, and Chicago, among others, but Kansas City seemed to be a big city without the prob

found herself hooked. “That is when I decided to apply to med ical school,” she says. “I thought initially I would become a rheumatologist, but all the interesting infections I saw during the Peace Corps led me to infectious diseases!” Having seen a different side of the world, she returned to her hometown with an appreciation for the city and its people and for the opportu nities to assist the youngest patients in the region. “When you treat a child who is very ill in the hospital—sometimes you are unsure if they will recover and if they do, to what extent?” Gold man says. “One of the best moments that can happen is when you are walking down a hospital hallway and look up to see your patient who was so ill at one point now walking down the hall, maybe returning for a follow-up appointment at the hos pital. They are in street clothes and well-appearing, and their parents stop to talk and provide you an update of how well their child is doing. That feeling never gets old.” Given her spe cialty, she had an informed view of the potential threat during the COVID-19 outbreak. “The pandemic was hard for all of us in medicine,” Goldman says. “As a pediatric infectious diseases doctor, I was expected to be up-to-date on ever-changing data at all times. Many of the treatments used in adults had little to no data available in children; however, we still needed to care for sick children who had COVID.” She says she was forced to become more comfortable with uncertainty and to become more flexible. “One of the best things to come from COVID has been meeting and working with so many people that educate and care for children in schools who are working so hard to keep everyone safe.” She would love to see all children have their basic health-care needs addressed, and is inspired by the words of former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders: “You can’t educate a child who isn’t healthy, and you can’t keep a child healthy who isn’t educated.”

lems of most big cities. He’s a neurosurgeon, he says, because “you can make a significant impact in people’s lives. I’ve dealt with a lot of trauma and injury, especially spinal trauma. If you do it at the correct time, it can even save a young life. I can now claim to have saved 50 to 100 young lives who, if we had not intervened, would have died. They can grow up, go to work and feed their families for a lifetime. That is unsurpassable: I can’t think of another specialty that has the satisfaction of making such a huge impact on someone’s life so quickly.” He came here 4½ years ago, and half that time has been spent in a pandemic emergency that has changed health-care delivery around him. One change of many, he said, is telemedicine, which “gives you a new perspective on the delivery of care. There are many things we can accomplish with it.” Health systems have also learned the importance of triage, with a better understanding of “who do we need to get to first to treat. We became very good at that, helping patients in time before things led to adverse outcomes.” On a personal level, Gandhoke says, “I learned that no matter how well-educated, well-trained you are, nature has its way of reminding you that in the grand scheme of things, we are all just specks of sand.” If he could do one thing to pro mote change within health care, it would be to eliminate the fear among physicians that leads to the practice of defensive medicine. The entire system, Gandhoke says, suffers because “unnecessary tests are ordered, time is wasted, and it’s a bur den on the economy and the nation.”

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October 2022

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