5-19-09

SIU School of Medicine Graduation

The sixty-six new physicians graduating from Southern Illinois University School of Medicine were challenged by a national leader in medical education to be part of the solution needed for fixing America’s health care system.

Commencement exercises for the 35th graduating class of S-I-U School of Medicine took place this past Saturday (May 16) in Springfield.  As the commencement speaker, Dr. Darrell Kirch, president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, told the Class of 2009 that 47 million Americans are without health insurance.

SOUND BITE: “Even the people who are insured, don’t feel that the have a medical home – someplace that knows them and  understands them.  What they feel is medical homeless – bounced from caregiver to caregiver and test to test.  There are people here who feel that no one in the health care system appreciates or understands them as a person.  And that is the last thing we want for our patients.”

Dr. Kirch asked the new physicians to help recapture the ethics of the profession and not let the burdens of financial pressures and regulatory obligations get in the way.

SOUND BITE:  “Let’s all find the courage to together. . .  Let’s finally fix this imbalance in our ethics.  Let’s take on this lack of fairness.  Because despite all the things we know, all our knowledge, all our skills, we should promise each other today that we’re never going to lose the sense of doing good, of making a better society.”

The new SIU physicians will begin their residency training in their chosen specialty fields in July.  Two thousand, two hundred and sixty-eight (2,268) physicians have now earned SIU medical degrees since 1975.

This is Ruth Slottag, SIU School of Medicine in Springfield.