NHSC PEOPLE AND PLACES

NHSC Alum Becomes the New Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the United State Public Health Service, Commissioned Corps

CAPT David Rutstein was selected as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer effective 1 June 2005. In this capacity he serves as the principal advisor to the United States Surgeon General and provides leadership to all medical officers in the Department.

Although he is serving as one of the Department’s chief administrative leaders, he has not forgotten his NHSC clinical roots. As a family practice physician, with the mission of the NHSC in his heart, he continues to make a difference in the lives of the underserved by treating patients at the East of the River Community Health Center in Washington, D.C.

CAPT Rutstein attended both Morehouse College School of Medicine and then Brown University Medical School where he received his medical degree in 1983. After an initial year of internal medicine at Salem Hospital in Salem, MA, he completed three more years of residency training in family medicine at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, CA.

After completing residency training, CAPT Rutstein served for 13 years as a National Health Service Corps (NHSC) family physician in the state hospitals of Pohnpei and Yap, both in the Federated States of Micronesia. While in Micronesia, he directed a wide array of clinical and public health initiatives, substantially improving the health care and public health infrastructure in the country. In 2000, he returned from Micronesia to assume the Chief Clinical Officer position and subsequently the Chief Medical Officer position of the NHSC, with broad administrative and leadership responsibilities concerning clinical and public health issues. In 2003, he became the Deputy Associate Administrator for Health Professions in the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), sharing responsibility for the development, distribution, and retention of the health care workforce serving underserved populations in the United States. In 2005, he assumed his current position as the Director of HRSA’s Office of International Health Affairs and Senior Advisor to the HRSA Administrator.

CAPT Rutstein maintains memberships in several medical and public health professional organizations including the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Commissioned Officers Association, the Reserve Officers Association, and the Pacific Basin Medical Association. He has been a regular corps officer since 2004 and has received numerous awards and honors from PHS and the private sector. These include the PHS Distinguished Service Medal, the PHS Outstanding Service Medal with Valor, the PHS Citation, the PHS Outstanding Unit Citation, the PHS Crisis Response Service Award, two PHS Isolated Hardship Awards, the PHS Foreign Duty Award, and an Honorary Medical Degree as well as a Distinguished Alumnus Award, both from Morehouse School of Medicine.

In addition to his administrative responsibilities, CAPT Rutstein continues to serve as a family physician at East of the River Community Health Center in Washington, D.C., as well as an occasional instructor of both Advanced Trauma Life Support and Tropical Medicine/Public Health at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

Two Nursing Professionals Selected As Robert Wood Johnson Fellows
Margaret Flinter and Donna Torrisi have a lot more in common than their shared occupations and their commitment to the underserved. Both are among the 20 professionals nationwide who were selected as Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellows. Both are crusaders for making quality health care universally accessible in America. And both call themselves members, in their own right, of the National Health Service Corps (NHSC). The prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program is a three-year advanced leadership initiative for nurses in senior executive roles that aspire to lead and shape the future of the U.S. health care system.

Margaret Flinter R.N., M.S.N., A.P.R.N., is the vice president and clinical director of the Community Health Center (CHC) Inc., headquartered in Middletown, Connecticut. CHC is a private, nonprofit, federally qualified health center (FQHC) that provides comprehensive primary medical, dental, mental health, and social services care to 40,000 primarily low-income and uninsured persons through its seven locations in the State. She also maintains a clinical practice as a family nurse practitioner at the Center's site in Clinton, Connecticut.

With the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellowship, Flinter plans to advance her mission of creating extraordinarily good health care organizations that can make access to quality health care a reality for everyone in this country. "The Community Health Center model is a model that works and one that we can build upon for real structural reform in the United States."

Donna Torrisi, M.S.N., is the founder and director of the Philadelphia-based Family Practice and Counseling Network-three nurse-managed primary health care centers that provide comprehensive care to multiple public housing developments, and to an increasingly large area of underserved and uninsured communities in the city. The Network is an NHSC site owned by Resources for Human Development, a private nonprofit organization, also located in the city, that has human service programs in several other States.

Torrisi is using her fellowship to hone her already formidable leadership and organizational abilities, and to spread the benefits among her senior management. "My leadership project is to help nurse-managed health centers in the Nation to become FQHCs, assuring sustainable reimbursement for them. Since the centers work with underserved populations, this will assure continued care for greater numbers of people in need." Torrisi has had one nurse practitioner on her staff that was an NHSC Loan Repayor. Now, with the President's recent initiative to make all FQHCs automatic health professional shortage areas (HPSAs), she is hoping to add another NHSC clinician to her mental health care team in the near future.

Hero to the Women of Her Valley, Sister Angela Murdaugh Honored by Texas
Sister Angela Murdaugh, C.N.M., M.S.N., a legend in midwifery and a hero to the women of the Rio Grande Valley region, was inducted into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame. More than 4,000 people attended the ceremony, during which Sister Angela was honored as one of the State's most outstanding women.

The legacy of caring exemplified by Sister Angela is best demonstrated in the scores of C.N.M.s who have passed through the doors of her extraordinary birth center to train and to work, going on to distinguish themselves in their own right. Not surprising is the fact that a good number of Holy Family alumni are also NHSC alumni who, under Sister Angela, who have sharpened their skills while following their vision of providing quality health care to those who need it most.

Shocked by the lack of access to basic prenatal and childbirth care among the women she encountered-many of them poor seasonal farm workers with neither health insurance nor transportation-in 1972, Sister Angela founded and directed the first freestanding birth center in the State of Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley city of Raymondville. Eleven years later, she established Holy Family Birth Center, an NHSC site, in Weslaco, Texas. The Center provides prenatal care and delivery services, childbirth education, postpartum home visits, social services, clinic transportation, and childhood immunizations.

Two decades later, Holy Family Birth Center-and Sister Angela-have earned a national reputation for their pioneering work and successes, which include reducing the infant mortality rate in Texas's Hidalgo County by half. Sister Angela's model of care has been adapted nationally by other childbirth centers throughout the United States, and recently the American College of Nurse-Midwives honored Holy Family with its "With Women, for a Lifetime" commendation. She was also instrumental in establishing the National Association of Childbearing Centers' Standards for Birth Centers and in writing of the State Birth Center Regulations for Texas.