Spreading a Wealth of Knowledge

A few weeks ago, I received an email from an externship director at one of the schools and colleges of optometry asking if our institution would be interested in taking fourth-year externs from their school. We considered it, but I had to respectfully decline. We already had students from four other schools, and my colleagues and I felt we had already reached capacity and couldn’t guarantee that the additional students would receive the kind of educational and clinical experiences we would want to provide.

The extern director emailed me back to thank me for considering his request. He went on to tell me that he had been an extern with us years before and to say how great the experience had been for him. I had not looked carefully enough at the original email to notice who had sent it, but, once I read the name, I remembered that he had indeed been a student with us several years before.

As I sat back and thought about his email, it made me proud—not so much for anything I or the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute might have done for him, but proud of him for his success and his current role. Of course, I would be lying if I didn’t admit to a level of satisfaction that we had played some small part in his journey that brought him to mentor and positively influence other students. Mostly, though, I was proud of him and happy for his success.

The Importance of Mentors

Most of us can remember the positive influences that certain people, such as teachers or coaches, had on our lives. It’s generally not just one person but a collection of people along the way who have such a positive impact that they help to shape our characters and maybe, in some way, help to define who we are and who we become. These people made us work harder to achieve a certain level of success that we couldn’t have achieved or wouldn’t have wanted to attempt had they not been present in our lives.

Several people influenced me in optometry school, but the person who had the biggest impact on my life was Howell Findley, OD, the clinical director at Omni Services in Lexington, Kentucky. I was with Dr. Findley in 1986, a critical time in optometry. I witnessed firsthand what I recognize now as the birth of comanagement. What’s more, optometry was then starting to move toward a medical model.

At that time, there were not many opportunities in optometry schools (other than at Veterans Affairs hospitals) to gain the kind of clinical experience and training that was needed to prepare for what was coming. Comanagement centers, such as the Omni, provided that opportunity, but it came at a cost—these comanagement centers had to be perfect in almost every way. There was no room for error, and, as such, the centers’ directors also had to be nearly perfect. Refer to My Greatest Mentor to read more about why Dr. Findley was such an important influence on my life and on who I am today.

Creating Externship and Residency Programs

When I started at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in the late 1980s, we didn’t have a student externship program, nor did we have a residency program. It was a collective effort among our staff optometrists to get the leadership at Bascom Palmer to buy into these ideas. Ours was, after all, a teaching hospital and we believed that externs and optometric residents had a level of knowledge, training, and professionalism that would allow us to contribute to the overall mission of the institute, which is to provide excellence in eye care. We were excited to have externs and residents for the simple reason of wanting to give back. Combine that with the rich clinical and educational environment that a place like Bascom Palmer affords, and great things can be accomplished.

There are many great aspects of having student externs and/or residents at our institution. One is the satisfaction of witnessing their growth from when they start to when they finish and knowing that we were a part of that. Often, though, we get so caught up in the day-to-day stresses and struggles of our lives that we don’t appreciate these moments as often as we should. A second reward of this program is that it is a small way of giving back to our profession, of paying it forward in hopes that the next generation will be better trained and better prepared than we were. Our profession and our patients are better served by more thoroughly trained optometrists.

It should go without saying that externs and residents learn more by interacting with patients, especially those with difficult or challenging pathologies. Externs and residents also have the opportunity to pick up pearls and clinical insights by being around experienced doctors. Almost equally important for me, though, has been learning about the individual externs or residents and what led them here. As we age, a generational divide may develop between us and the externs and residents, who seem to remain ever in their mid-20s. I find that taking the time to connect with these young professionals makes the program more meaningful for them and for me. I wish I could say that this happens for me with each and every one of them who comes through. However, we have such a great group of ODs on our staff and so many incredible ophthalmologists with whom we work that I know these connections are made far more frequently than I realize.

A LEGACY OF LASTING INFLUENCE

I have no doubt that every one of our ODs would agree that one of the most meaningful and rewarding parts of our jobs is being able to work with student externs and residents. I sincerely hope that part of our legacy at Bascom Palmer is positively shaping the professional lives of our student externs and residents. In the end, there is no question that they leave with greater maturity and knowledge than they came with, but we—the ODs and ophthalmologists who have mentored them—also benefit from being around them and taking part in their journeys.