The NHSC and an Alumnus Honored by President
In May 2004, at a forum on community health centers at Youngstown State University
in Ohio, pediatrician Ron Dwinnells received a rather impressive
compliment. As part of a panel of local officials and community
health center representatives, he was honored by President
George W. Bush for outstanding contributions to Ohio’s
underserved and uninsured people.
“There's some really amazing things going on in the
Youngstown area, as well as across the country, to make
sure people have got a safety net,” said President
Bush. As the President began to detail what impressed him,
he brought up the National Health Service Corps (NHSC).
That’s when Dr. Dwinnells mentioned, “I’m
a National Health Service Corps alumnus.”
“Are you?” replied President Bush. “Good.”
President Bush later said, “See, I want people who
might be listening out there, who are docs out there, who
are wondering whether or not it makes sense to go and lend
their services and their expertise and their compassion
to a community health center to understand that it's a good
place to come.”
Dr. Dwinnells agrees with the President’s sentiments
on this issue. For even though he initially pursued the
NHSC Scholarship Program as a means to an end, he says,
“The NHSC placed me in a position to help—first
in a direct way as a physician, and now as an administrator,
where I am able to help many more patients on a broader
scale.”
Dr. Dwinnells was born in 1955 in Kamakura, Japan, the
son of an American serviceman and a Japanese mother. He
grew up on a series of overseas and stateside military bases.
“Coming from a humble family with very little means
made me appreciate the people who had been kind and giving
to us,” he recalls. “I knew that someday I wanted
to be able to do the same for someone else.” Dr. Dwinnells
was the first person in his family to graduate from college
and also the first to attend medical school.
“The NHSC was the only way I could achieve my goal
without the burden of loan repayment,” he explains.
“At the same time, it positioned me right where I
wanted to be—helping people and families, like my own, get
the quality health care they deserve.”
His association with Ohio North East Health Systems, Inc.,
a network of community health centers, began in 1993, when
he started working part time at the Youngstown clinic. He
became a staff director in 1994 and CEO in 1998, overseeing
the clinic’s exponential growth thereafter.
“When I took over the CEO position, our annual budget
of $600,000 supported a patient base of around 3,000 and
roughly 8,000 visits a year,” says Dr. Dwinnells.
“By 2003, the budget had risen to over $5 million
and accommodated a patient base of over 10,000 with 40,000
visits per year.”
As a result, Dr. Dwinnells is advocating for increased
funding of community health centers across the country.
In April of 2004, he visited Capitol Hill, urging House
lawmakers on the Appropriations Subcommittee to supply funds
that would address the skyrocketing number of uninsured
patients who have increasingly been walking through the
doors of a community health center for primary health care.
Back in Youngstown, as Dr. Dwinnells recruits new physicians
to join his staff, he looks to the NHSC as a primary source.
He says it’s an ideal way “to recruit outstanding
doctors who are deeply committed to humanitarian causes,
and will provide health care through compassion, empathy,
and humility.”
These are the very same traits that inspired the President’s
praise during his visit to Youngstown. “We've got
people in our country who hurt, who are lonely, who wonder
whether or not the future belongs to them, whether or not
there's any brighter day,” said President Bush. But
he added, “We've got people in our country who are
willing to surround the lonely with love and to help. See,
that's the strength of America.”
Source for Bush quotes:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/05/20040525-7.html
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