Dr Manuela Pattison-Bacon loves “everything” about medicine. “I always wanted to be a doctor,” she says. “There was never anything else I wanted to do.” It just took a little time to figure out exactly what kind of doctor Dr Pattison-Bacon needed to be.
In the years since graduating from medical school at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Dr Pattison-Bacon has spent a couple of years in private practices and a hospital emergency room in Ontario, followed by locum work in rural Alberta, and stints as a family physician at a seniors’ clinic in Calgary, Alta, and as a clinical associate at an oncology inpatient unit in Edmonton, Alta.
For a time, that last posting seemed “perfect.” Because she wasn’t working on a fee-for-service basis, Dr Pattison-Bacon could spend more time with each of her patients. She was also dealing with more complicated cases—“the sickest of the sick,” she says—patients undergoing stem cell transplants or really harsh chemotherapy. Even so, the work was emotionally draining.
For more than a year, she cared for 2 young women—one dying of colon cancer, the other ovarian cancer. “We became so close and watching them fade away took such a toll,” she says. “I was crying on the way to work and on the way home.”
Fortunately, Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital was just setting up its first hospitalist program and the head of family medicine recruited Dr Pattison-Bacon. Patients are referred from the emergency department to 1 of the 50 beds in the program and then she oversees their care throughout their hospital stay. With a full roster of specialists on-site and readily available, “the atmosphere is really supportive,” she says. “Seven years in and I’m still learning something new with almost every case.”
The Royal Alexandra Hospital is a teaching hospital and an inner-city hospital. The city’s homeless shelters are just blocks away and new medical challenges are wheeled through its doors every day. “We see very acute cases, oncology cases, and internal cases, mixed with substance abuse, geriatrics, and palliative care,” says Dr Pattison-Bacon. “There’s a mix and a balance. I even get to see some of my patients go home these days. Finally I feel like I’m really making a difference.”
“The atmosphere is really supportive”
Notes
THE COVER PROJECT Canadian Family Physician has embarked on a project to assemble the portrait of family medicine in Canada. Each cover of the journal features a family physician chosen at random from our membership list, along with a short essay—a brief glimpse of the person and the practice. Over time, the randomness will become representative and the differences, taken together, will define what it is that all family physicians have in common.
Footnotes
Dr Pattison-Bacon is a hospitalist at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, Alta.
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