Students, Faculty, Residents, Staff, Alumni, Board Members and friends,
Greetings on a delightful Fall morning from our Elkins Park Campus. It’s been an exciting, fun and busy week for all of us, especially those who participated in the Physician Assistant Long White Coat ceremony and our first in-person commencement ceremony since the pandemic began in March, 2020! We had the opportunity to celebrate some members of the Class of 2020 as well as the Class of 2021 during the festivities as well as hear an extremely inspiring message from our honorary degree recipient, the Honorable Alison Beam, Acting Secretary of Health for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Check our website for stories on the Kimmel Center ceremony, our Graduate Awards Luncheon and the Physician Assistant Studies program’s Long White Coat ceremony.
NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY: We celebrated National Coming Out Day on Oct. 11, a day that recognizes the milestones of being seen and heard and the continued strides for equity and respect, specific to the LGBTQ+ communities. The day allowed us to continue to raise awareness for individuals within the LGBTQ+ community, and combat the silence that often breeds homophobia and the hierarchy of sexual orientation and identity norms. National Coming Out Day originated 33 years ago with a march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, and has been celebrated in all 50 states since 1990.
GRAND ROUNDS: Audiology Grand Rounds will be today (Friday, Oct. 15) at 12:15 p.m. The topic is “Navigating Patient Comorbidities and Subjectivity,” presented by Alexander Wozniacki and Luke Obenrader. Click here to join the meeting.
IMPACT HBCU: On Tuesday evening Drs. Trego, Mosley-Williams and I had the opportunity to participate in Impact HBCU, where over 300 attendees from Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other undergraduate schools were able to learn about optometry, PCO, Salus DEI efforts, our Summer Enrichment Program and certain aspects of the optical industry. It was an informative and fun event!
STAFF SPOTLIGHT: The Staff Spotlight this week is on Joe Noce, who works in the University bookstore. Joe has been playing in a classic rock/blues band for nearly 30 years. To read more about Joe, click here.
THE INSPIRATION CENTER: Join Robert Serianni, MS, CCC-SLP, FNAP, the chair and program director of the department of Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) at Salus University, as he moderates a podcast that focuses on The Inspiration Center, a community therapy organization in the country of Belize, where physical, occupational and speech therapists work with the families in Belize with children from birth through 16 years of age. He is joined by the students and the speech pathologists from the program who had the opportunity to cross borders to provide speech pathology care in areas of great need. Click here to listen.
PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL WINNER: In our continuing series featuring the individual Presidential Medal of Honor winners for 2021, read more here about Reade Fahs, Chief Executive Officer of National Vision Inc. and a member of our Board of Trustees since 2017.
THE COLLEGE TOUR CAST: In another continuing feature for us, “Meet the Cast of The College Tour,” we introduce you to Samantha Wereszczak ‘22PA. Samantha was a respiratory therapist working on the frontlines of the Medical ICU where she experienced working collaboratively with other healthcare disciplines, which is what initiated her decision to start her path at Salus to become a physician assistant. Read more about her here.
RESIDENT CLASS OF 2022: This week’s new resident feature is on Bailey Ford, OD, ‘22Resident. Because she had such great experiences with her eye doctors, Dr. Ford wanted to be the best doctor she could be for her patients. She believed that pursuing a residency would ensure that, especially at PCO/Salus. Read more about Dr. Ford here.
FINAL THOUGHTS: As we celebrated our graduates on Tuesday, I was extremely pleased to hear that one of Secretary Beam’s recommendations to our graduates, as well as all of us listening, was to, “think bigger.” As she mentioned the challenges of “inequitable healthcare, stalled education, hungry families, oversubscribed mental health and unemployment,” Secretary Beam challenged us to use this “once in a lifetime experience” to take “preconceived, rigid constructs and turn them on their head”. Noting that the pandemic has exposed many of the challenges that have existed for a while but surfaced because everything was so stressed.
Let’s try to capitalize on Secretary Beam’s wisdom and challenge what many have always accepted as societal norms and work to develop creative and effective solutions that will serve to improve the lives of all those we are entrusted to care for. Much of that work starts here, at Salus. We are committed to working towards improving access to quality equitable healthcare for everyone. For example, ensuring those students that did have their education “stalled,” have good vision, hearing and important tactile skills to succeed, and screening and appropriately referring those we find have food insecurity or mental health challenges. The care we provide must be holistic, integrated and empathetic.
As I told our graduates on Tuesday, and Secretary Beam also noted during her remarks, they’ve all been given a great gift – and this is their time to transform all they have learned into something that will positively affect the lives of all those they will care for. While each graduate will confront these challenges differently, they all will be extremely successful. For those of us remaining behind, our gift will be to operationalize these lessons as we care for our patients and clients in all of our clinics, seek to innovate our programs to apply lessons learned during the pandemic and to continue to push the envelope of excellence in everything we do.
As you prepare for the weekend, please take the time listen to Secretary Beam’s comments on our website to hear them first hand. Continue to wear your face mask when around others, vaccinated or not, wash your hands frequently and socially distance when you can. When you have the alternative, I highly encourage you not to eat inside when going to restaurants or bars. Take advantage of the nice weather while we have it! Remember, what you do off campus really does affect all of us on campus. Have a great weekend. Be safe, be smart, look out for one another and remain SALUS STRONG!
Mike
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