‘It makes us better practitioners and better people, too’
WVU students, faculty and staffers reach out across the region to offer medical services and other volunteering for those who need them the most

by Jim Bissett, WVU News & Information Services

 

Dallas Nibert’s volunteer work takes a big bite out of his Friday night, but the dentist wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

Nibert, who graduated in 2007 from West Virginia University’s School of Dentistry, puts in full days in a bustling practice in his hometown of Huntington. And when Friday rolls around, he isn’t focusing on “me time.” He’s thinking of his fellow Mountaineers, which is why he ends the work week by walking out of one exam room—and right into another.

 

Nibert helps staff a free dental clinic in Cabell County for West Virginians who might not get care otherwise. There are the youngsters with cavities and crooked teeth and their parents, who know that a passable smile means extra oomph for that job interview or other setting where confidence and self-esteem are key.

 

“I just feel good about doing it,” Nibert said during a recent break at the Huntington practice he shares with a fellow dentist. “It just seems like something I’m supposed to be doing.”

 

He owes it all, he said, to the experiences he had in a unique medical outreach program, the WV Rural Health Education Partnerships, offering medical care of every stripe for residents in the state’s more isolated areas.

 

The six-week program works with colleges, universities and medical facilities across the state. It’s a final-year requirement for students training in the health professions. The WVU end of the partnership in Morgantown encompasses the schools of Medicine, Pharmacy, Nursing and Dentistry at the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center.

 

Future physicians and other budding professionals hit the hollows, country lanes and coal towns for work in rural clinics. It’s there they learn a lasting lesson: that patients are much more than co-payments and chart numbers on a computer desktop.

 

They’re people.

 

“That’s what stays with you the most,” Nibert said. “You get to know patients’ families. You know their communities because you’re there, too. It makes you a better practitioner, and I like to think it makes you a better person.”

 

And that’s the whole point, said John Prescott, M.D., dean of the WVU School of Medicine.

 

Logistics and economics are obvious parts of that prescription for service, he said.

 

“It’s not always easy to get to a doctor in this state,” he said. “People can’t always afford it. People don’t always have the transportation to get to the clinic. West Virginia has whole populations that have been traditionally underserved for generations. The partnerships are turning that around.”

 

It turned Nibert around. What began as a required rotation morphed into a roll call of awareness for the West Virginia native who hadn’t strayed too far from the Huntington city limits before driving up Interstate 79 for dental school.

 

“The poverty surprised me, I have to admit,” he said. “You see what people are up against, and it makes you want to work that much harder. It (the partnership) pretty much defined to me why I got into this in the first place. You do want to help.”

 

That’s one four-letter word, to be sure, that works overtime to define the mission of the state’s flagship University.

 

That includes the efforts of the women’s soccer team raising money for breast cancer research and the football players who brought autographs and smiles to the young patients of WVU Children’s Hospital.

 

That includes the theater majors who staged puppet shows for the kids of Hurricane Katrina at Camp Dawson and the advocacy work of student Emily Renzelli, whose award-winning malaria awareness campaign is netting national attention.

 

That includes the med school dean, who has been known to practice what he teaches. Prescott is an ER doc by training who once detoured a family vacation to administer roadside care to two people seriously injured in a rollover car crash.

 

“We have an obligation to help one another,” he said, “and that’s really all there is to it.”

 

03-31-08