Meet five Georgians who make a big difference in the lives of the people they encounter in the course of their workdays. For some, the work is quiet and routine. For others, it’s a matter of life or death.
Heroes seem to enter our lives at critical moments, often – but not always – in dramatic fashion. Here are the stories of five Georgia healthcare professionals who find rewards by serving their patients on a daily basis and, on occasion, by going above and beyond the call of duty.
An Americus doctor was on the scene moments after a spring tornado destroyed the local hospital. A former cardiologist takes on the challenge of running a large Metro Atlanta health system. A Waycross EMT director led a team that provided first aid and preventive care to legions of firefighters working to control the devastating South Georgia wildfires last spring. A Savannah audiologist, who pioneered early hearing tests for infants, serves as a community volunteer; and an Atlanta physician deals daily with burn victims – and provides special help for children. Here are their stories.
Downed trees blocked his street so Mays, a gynecologist, began walking the three blocks to Sumter Regional Medical Center. Weaving through a maze of debris and stepping gingerly around fallen power lines, Mays made his way by the beam of a flashlight to Sumter Regional. What he found when he arrived stunned him. “The hospital was devastated,” he says.
With the situation on that floor stabilized, Mays began checking on other parts of the hospital. For the next five hours, he joined hospital administrators in a different kind of triage: sorting through the debris to assess which parts of the badly damaged hospital were most immediately needed and finding a way to get them functional. What Mays says he found were staff and strangers who were compassionate and amazingly resourceful.
Soon patients began being evacuated to area hospitals, and over the next three days a tent hospital provided by a private company began to rise from the grounds of the nearly completely destroyed Sumter Regional. Since the tornado, Mays has spent his time delivering babies in the tent hospital in Americus and at Albany’s Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital 40 miles away.
When the popular CEO of WellStar Health System, Dr. Robert Lipson, was killed in a motorcycle accident last November, the Atlanta medical community felt a deep loss, but none more than the physicians and staff of WellStar’s hospital network along the northern arc of the Atlanta suburbs.
It fell to WellStar’s board of trustees to carry on by finding a new CEO. Though a nationwide search was launched, the right candidate was found in WellStar’s front yard. The trustees’ vice chairman, Dr. Greg Simone, got the nod.
Simone is part of a growing trend in the healthcare industry: the physician as administrator. Simone certainly has the credentials. A cardiologist armed with an MBA, he grew a two-doctor practice to one with 24 physicians and 150 employees, served as president and CEO of his own cardiovascular medicine practice in Marietta for 27 years and has a long history of service in the WellStar network. Simone brings to the job a dedication for teamwork and an eye for the talent he needs to produce results.
On April 14, Mark Walker got a call to get some of his EMTs (emergency medical technicians) out to the west side of Ware County where a forest fire was rapidly spreading.
Walker, director of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) for Ware County, knew from experience that if he was being called to a fire there was a real threat to the firefighters already there. Though the fire was only 90 minutes old when the EMTs were called in, firemen were growing exhausted and were troubled by smoke inhalation, stinging eyes and dehydration.
Firemen were being rotated out of the fire every four to 12 hours, depending on the intensity of the blaze they were fighting. Emergency medical technicians arrived from all parts of the South to help.
As fire moved and spread, the need to rotate firefighters out of the blazing woods and into a rehab station grew. “We had to rehab several hundred people a day,” Walker recalls. It soon became apparent that this simple fire started by a downed power line was reaching epic proportions. All the major broadcast networks sent report-ers and began live coverage.
As the fire swept into four Georgia counties, Ware, Clinch, Charlton and Atkinson, Walker and the firefighters moved their emergency operations center ahead of the flames. “There were places the ambulances just couldn’t get to,” Walker says.
In the end, the casualty list was minimal. “We had a lot of sprained ankles, an ankle fracture, a wrist injury, smoke inhalation, dehydration,” Walker says. There was one terrible incident in which a firefighter was entangled in a hose and dragged down a road by a passing truck, resulting in multiple fractures.
Walker and his emergency team stayed on duty for nearly two full months while the flames destroyed 115,000 acres and consumed 18 homes.
For Barbara Gatens, altruism is both a profession and an obsession.
An audiologist, she is director of the Center for Oto-Neurology at Savannah’s St. Joseph’s/Candler Health System – she’s been there since the center was founded in 1977. The center detects and treats hearing loss and other related conditions. Gatens is considered a Georgia pioneer in the testing of newborns for hearing disorders.
“We can now test babies as young as one day, while the national norm is two years,” Gatens says. Such tests are invaluable in getting early treatment to remove obstacles to learning language and developing speech.
Under Gatens’ guidance, St. Joseph’s/Candler be-came the region’s first hospital to conduct a hospital-based universal infant hearing screening program. The hospital’s Annual NeuroAudiology Seminar, founded by Gatens, brings internationally known specialists to Savannah to brief physicians and audiologists on the latest developments in the field.
Gatens pioneered the creation of speech programs for patients with autism and Parkinson’s disease. As a board member of Georgia Infirmary, the nation’s first African-American hospital, Gatens has been instrumental in taking free health testing to low-income neighborhoods and public housing.
In her off hours, Gatens helps Habitat for Humanity build houses for the poor and conducts career counseling at local schools. As a founding member of the hospital’s aptly named Angels of Mercy volunteer group, she helps stock the local food bank.
“I have always been one of those persons who has their fingers into everything,” Gatens says. She serves on a long list of nonprofit boards and is the go-to woman for anyone in need.
Few violations of the human body can be so horrific in their consequences as burns, a fact well known to Dr. Walter Ingram, head of the burn unit at Atlanta’s Henry Grady Hospital and a faculty member at Emory University Medical School.
And to manage their recovery long after surgery and rehab, Ingram follows his young patients to Camp Oo-U-La near Eatonton, a place where children who are burn survivors can simply have fun, and where Ingram serves as the unpaid medical director.
In return, Ingram teaches courses on burns to the firefighters. He’s also active in the American Burn Association, a group whose membership spans the spectrum from firefighters to surgeons, all devoted to preventing or treating burns.