Advisor to BMC-CIR Minority Physician Recruitment Program Named Pentagon’s Top Doctor

Boston Medical Center’s loss is most definitely the country’s gain. In late April 2010, President Barack Obama chose Dr. Jonathan Woodson to serve as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, colloquially the Pentagon’s “top doctor.” Dr. Woodson was Senior Vascular Surgeon at BMC, and Associate Professor of Surgery and Associate Dean at Boston University School of Medicine, where he oversaw the recruitment and retention of minority students. For more than 20 years, the triple-boarded (internal medicine, general and vascular surgery) African-American physician, who trained at Massachusetts General Hospital, was also a guiding force behind BMC and CIR’s innovative Minority Physician Recruitment Program.

The MPRP was the brain child of a handful of minority resident physician union members in the late 1970’s who were frustrated with how few minority housestaff were training at Boston City Hospital. This public hospital served a diverse patient population in a city that at the time was capturing national headlines for a violent school desegregation battle. The union (the House Officers’ Association, which affiliated with CIR years later) paid for the residents to attend the annual Student National Medical Association conference, among other actions.

In 1980, the residents put a proposal on the negotiating table to establish a formal recruitment program. The proposal was a hit. From a $15,000 item in the 1980 collective bargaining agreement, it grew to be a more than $150,000 commitment from Boston Medical Center in 2010. Along the way, the MPRP established its Subsidized Elective Program to attract medical students of color to BMC for four week electives in the residency program they are interested in. The result: as of July 2010, 21 percent of BMC residents and fellows will be under-represented minorities.

Dr. Woodson was an Army Reserve Brigadier General and served tours of duty as a surgeon in Central America, Saudi Arabia, Kosovo, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs is the principle advisor to the Secretary of Defense on health issues and oversees the entire U.S. military health system and its $590 billion budget. This includes the care of war wounded, and basic health care for 9.6 million active and retired service members and their family

As CIR member Dr. Bernadatte Gilbert, a PGY 2 family medicine resident who also encountered Dr. Woodson when she was a medical student at BU, put it, “Dr. Woodson is an excellent motivator and inspiration to young physicians. You can’t help but feel if he can manage marriage, fatherhood, deanship, his administrative duties as assistant chief medical officer, and a demanding military career as a Brigadier General, then certainly I can manage the various rigors of medical school and residency by following his example of organization and diligence.”