Hooked on Primary Care with Jay W. Lee, MD, MPH, FAAFP

After college, I thought I might work for Médecins Sans Frontières one day, so I grew my hair long and moved to rural post-war El Salvador, where I worked for a non-governmental organization supporting local Salvadoran physicians in the field. I was in my early twenties, trained as a wilderness emergency medical technician, and armed with hope. My job was to do whatever needed to be done, including take vital signs, dispense medications, scrub into surgeries, facilitate a potable water project and teach first aid.

I was deployed for a year, and I experienced an intersection of medicine and public health that cannot be learned in a textbook. When you’re in your early twenties, a year feels like a long time, but you realize that changing the world requires a lot more time. I also learned the power of working together to achieve our shared mission. I’m happy to say my time as a medical volunteer nearly 30 years ago still flavors my work as a family physician today.

Fast forward to the present, and I am a family physician with more than two decades of experience who is almost as idealistic as I was during my time in El Salvador. I still aim to do whatever is needed to change the world, but I’ve become more seasoned in my approach. I see patients at a local community health center, primarily serving non-English speaking immigrants and justice-impacted individuals leaving the carceral system. I also work at a clinically integrated network serving 400,000 mostly Medicaid recipients whose medical home is at one of nine health centers in three counties.

I am fulfilled knowing I continue to work with individual patients and to ‘physician-eer’ systems of care upstream. It’s care that’s first-contact, comprehensive, continuous and coordinated, and it’s never boring. You might say I’ve become the physician I wrote about in my personal statement.

Jay W. Lee, MD, MPH, FAAFP
Board member, American Academy of Family Physicians