Core Clinical Partners Emergency Medicine Scholarship: 2024 Winner

Growing up with parents in the construction and secretarial fields, a life in medicine never occurred to me.

Naturally, as a child I wanted to be a construction worker to take after my father. Then I always loved getting my teeth cleaned at the dentist (because they gave lots of laughing gas) so I wanted to be a dentist. This all changed my senior year in high school after a terrifying English class where I had to perform the abdominal thrust maneuver on my teacher because she was choking on hard candy. The rush of adrenaline and realizing that the instinct to get up in front of all my peers to help another human without second thought then switched my career to "something in medicine". This opened a whole new world to me that I never thought about. The only person who worked in medicine that I knew was my aunt as an Emergency Room nurse. Unfortunately, she did not know the intricacies that the path to medicine had in store, but she opened up the first, and most important, opportunity in the form of volunteering in the Emergency Room. Volunteering turned into working as a technician in the ER which then blossomed into working as a scribe in this same ER. This allowed me to not only experience many different patient presentations but also pick the brains of the ER physicians that I worked one on one with for over 4 years while in college.

Growing up I split my time between rural farmlands, closer to my home, and urban streets, where I went to high school, met most of my friends, and spent a large portion of my time. This interesting dichotomy formed the basis of who I am as an individual, experiencing both the positives and negatives of each very different, yet somehow, similar regions. I don't know if it was maturing or being in such an extraordinary environment such as the Emergency Department but this is when I realized how lucky I was to have experience from a wide range of life and the benefit it can have in the ER. I frequently found myself being able to navigate tense situations with ease due to the ability to recognize the area of dispute and act as a negotiator. By far the thing to cause the most altercations was poor communication and the lingering of the unknown. While parts of the middle and upper class normally have primary care doctors and resources to monitor and manage their health in the clinic, as the socioeconomic status of the patient declines so does, on average, their ability to have the follow up that all humans should thus resulting in higher reliance of care in the ED. If the patient has limited outpatient follow up and they feel they are left in the dark or feel as if the ER does not care about them then where are these patients going to get the care they deserve? It is pivotal that as the last resort for so many unfortunate souls in this country, we in the ER recognize this and take the precious time to help these individuals navigate their health and provide the resources and direction for their next steps. I love being able to call myself an Emergency Physician, not only to do all the cool things we love to do but to be able to see people in their worst times and lend a gentle, caring hand for them to be reminded that we do care and will not forget them.

Benjamin Bayly