Clancy balances family, career challengesby Cindy Abole Public Relations Physician Dawn Clancy has a heart for primary care medicine and the patients that she serves. She owes that to a lifelong passion and resolve for improving access to care for others and the wise support and camaraderie of mentors and guides along the way. Since 1993, Clancy worked with the Lowcountry’s neediest patient populations, the uninsured and underinsured, to find ways to provide the best level of cost-effective medical care. As a clinician, researcher and educator, she's at the forefront of finding ways to improve medicine’s gaps and inequities in the delivery and practice of health care. Throughout her career success, Clancy managed to achieve a fine balance between work and active family life. She is a busy wife and mother of three. “It’s a delicate dance—balancing career with family,” Clancy said. According to Clancy, that same skill of counterbalancing is also needed among men and women managing a career in academic medicine. She acknowledges a “quadruple threat” of career-related responsibilities in medicine: clinical care (care of patients); research (data gathering); and teaching (education of students) and advocacy (working toward policy changes). This is something the MUSC Women Scholars Initiative is trying to address. Clancy began her career at MUSC in 1981 as a medical student and continued her internal medicine residency before working as an emergency room physician at Charleston Memorial Hospital (CMH). After a year in the emergency department, she entered private practice only to close her doors 18 months later due to financial challenges related to reimbursement inequities resulting from a high volume Medicare practice. Motivated by her desire to provide care for the Tri-county's uninsured and underinsured patients, she returned to CMH emergency department where she practiced until the university opened Mc-Clennan-Banks General Internal Medicine Clinic for those patients. Today, Clancy continues her work as a faculty clinician at McClennan-Banks Adult Primary Care Clinic working with residents and students. Seeing inequities in the Medicare system and other gaps during her experiences as an emergency room and primary care physician led her towards a desire for action and advocacy. Clancy became actively involved with the American College of Physicians (ACP). She began speaking out and rallied fellow practitioners toward better physician advocacy and action addressing practice issues like access to care, training and development, liability reform, career recruitment and retainment, and other challenges affecting physicians and patients. In 2003, Clancy was recognized with the ACP’s Key Contact of the Year Award for her advocacy work with Congress and her peers in addressing health care and practice issues. She is currently South Carolina ACP Chapter chair for the Health and Public Policy Committee and is governor-elect (April 2006) of the statewide ACP Chapter. With her career successes, colleagues guided her towards research, especially in the area of health services. She was introduced to Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Epidemiology’s Barbara Tilley, Ph.D., and epidemiologist Kathy Magruder, Ph.D. Realizing how today’s research drives academic medicine and change, Clancy sought guidance preparing and attaining health science research awards. She worked with Tilley and her multi-year Excellence Centers to Eliminate Ethic/Racial Disparities (EXCEED) grant and later a chronic illness care grant. Next, she focused on teaching diabetes prevention to her patients and wanted to learn how to prepare and translate her adult primary care experiences into useful research data. In 1999, she was referred to Magruder, who is the director of the MUSC Center for Health Care Research. It was not long after their initial meeting that their collaboration evolved to become a nurturing, mentoring partnership between the two. “Dawn is such a committed individual,” said Magruder. “She is a superb clinician and researcher who shares a great focus on research and clinical issues. I taught her ways to design research methods and strategies that could help her translate clinical observations into valid research questions. In turn, she’s helped me learn a lot about diabetes from a clinical care perspective.” So far, Clancy has found success in the research arena. In 2000, she was named a collaborator with Tilley’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality/DHHS $10.1 million grant, which looked at ways of improving the health of South Carolina blacks in the areas of hypertension, diabetes and other diseases. Clancy led a pilot study to identify models and interventions relating to blacks and type 2 diabetes. She has since contributed to other grants promoting health education and the promotion of good health care practices especially among minorities. Among her latest accomplishments, Clancy earned her Master of Science in Clinical Research from the Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Epidemiology last June under the gentle urging of her mentors. The program formally prepares clinicians in the preparation and reporting of medical research findings. “Accomplishing this is very important to me,” Clancy said. “I feel I have a clearer understanding about my work as I move forward with my career in research. I wish I possessed this same knowledge years ago.” Communications speaker to lead language workshopLanguage and communications expert and best-selling author Phyllis Mindell, Ph.D., will lead a daylong, interactive workshop, “A Woman’s Guide to the Language of Success” for MUSC faculty and staff at Gazes Auditorium, June 17.Sponsored by the MUSC Women Scholars Initiative, the event will begin with a morning session, 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. and afternoon session, 1:30 to 5 p.m. Lunch and coffee breaks will be scheduled. The workshop registration deadline is May 15. Fee is $10. Because of space availability, registration is limited, first-come-first-serve, to 40 women faculty. An engaging and provocative speaker and consultant on women’s issues, Mindell will speak on workplace dialect, weakness versus power in language, the language of negotiation and adding efficiency and power to communications, memo writing and other related topics. All workshop participants will receive a copy of her 2001 book, “How to Say It For Women.” Mindell, who recently was appointed adjunct professor at Georgetown University Medical School where she is developing her work in language and communications with science and medicine, has written several books and presented to a wide range of audiences of academic institutions, corporations and businesses, professional organizations and functions. She will present a mid-day open talk for the MUSC community, noon, June 17 at the Institute of Psychiatry Auditorium. The event is entitled, “Language and Power: What Charlotte (of Charlotte’s Web) Teaches Us.” Participants can register online at http://www2.edserv.musc.edu/musc_women/registration/registration.lasso. For information, call Aleatha Fields, 876-8986. Friday, May 6, 2005
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