A Day to Honor Our Doctors

3/25/2015

By COR CATENA

CEO, Commonwealth Health & Wilkes-Barre General Hospital

The field of health care is constantly undergoing change, brought on by scientific breakthroughs, technological advancements, government regulation and reform.

Many of the roles within the profession have changed as well.

But there is one constant: Physicians still shoulder the ultimate responsibility for a patient’s care whether it be in the emergency room, on the operating table or in a clinic.

That’s a heavy responsibility to shoulder. There is no passing the buck.

From the days of Hippocrates, doctors held the fate of their fellow human beings in their hands – and certainly in their hearts.

It’s why we pause today to thank the men and women who made the decision to travel down that long road to becoming a physician.

Today, March 30, is Doctors Day and we at Commonwealth Health are grateful for the hundreds of physicians who work in our hospitals, offices and clinics.   

We celebrate and honor their commitment to their field, their patients and their community. Be it a primary care doctor fresh out of residency, or a veteran surgeon who continues to hone his skills by adopting the latest technology, we thank you.

It is so easy to marvel at the almost miraculous life-saving tools that medicine employs. And just as easy to become frustrated with medicine when chronic disease, terminal illness and horrific accidents win the battle over the doctor’s most drastic life-saving measures.

It is too easy to forget that the physician – the healer, the comforter, the saver of lives – is a human.

The same doctor who was triumphant in making a diagnosis in a perplexing case has to deliver the grim prognosis to the patient and his family.

The pediatrician who is treating a severely injured or ill child has to go home to tuck in her own little ones.

The longtime family doctor who has watched a patient evolve from a vibrant and active lifestyle to an aging, weakened state may be facing the same dilemma with his own elderly parent.

Today we thank our doctors – newcomer and veteran, primary care and specialist -- for their unwavering care to the millions of lives we at Commonwealth Health touch each year.

We acknowledge their lives outside the hospital though we realize that their chosen career path often makes it difficult to separate the two worlds. We appreciate the obstetrician who ventures out in the middle of a frigid Northeastern Pennsylvania winter night to bring a new life into this world. We thank the emergency room physicians and hospitalists for the personal sacrifices they make by staffing our facilities on weekends and holidays. We are grateful to those doctors who answer emergency calls from our hospital staffs and patients while out for dinner with their spouses or during a child’s birthday party.

The physicians who serve the Commonwealth Health’s six hospitals and numerous clinics all have their own stories to tell, tales of heroic measures inside our walls and in their communities.

One Tunkhannock family doctor came to the area more than 40 years ago and worked as an orderly. He fell in love with medicine and the area and at 70-plus years has delivered more than 3,000 babies, watching and caring for them as they’ve grown into adults.

On the other end of the spectrum is a young family practitioner with two Ivy League graduate degrees under her belt who came back to this area to practice medicine and raise her family in her beloved hometown of Avoca.

Our doctors’ stories range from the Scranton physician who made the odd but life-saving diagnosis of stroke on a young child to the pediatrician who established a free children’s clinic in an old Pittston school.

One of our Berwick area doctors works with parents who are undergoing the often grueling process of adoption and another physician from that community left behind a lengthy and successful career in law enforcement to care for patients in a rural area.

One of our Wilkes-Barre area physicians from a prominent local family began medical school while raising her children and then dedicated her time and effort to a health clinic for the underprivileged.

They are all part of the Commonwealth Health family of physicians who work with us and the other members of our health care team of professionals to provide Northeastern Pennsylvania with outstanding medical care.

We are fortunate to have these men and women lead us in that mission. Today we acknowledge their contributions, sacrifices, skills and unwavering concern for our community.