Homeless Advocate Named 2009 Family Physician of the Year

A family medicine "man for all seasons" and a "physician's physician." Those are the words his medical colleagues use when referring to William Ellert, M.D. But to the homeless people on the streets of Phoenix, he is a compassionate and high-quality caregiver. It is all of those qualities, however, that got Ellert selected as the 2009 AAFP Family Physician of the Year.

A strong advocate for the homeless, this former Franciscan brother provides care for as many as possible of the 13,000 homeless men and women living on the streets and in the desert valleys around Phoenix and in Maricopa County.

Ellert grew up in Avilla, Ind., a small town in the rural Midwest. "In … Avilla, there weren't a lot of homeless people," says Ellert. "My family was very fortunate, and we traveled a lot. Seeing homeless people and recognizing their life was much in contrast to the life that I was blessed with was something that always pulled at my heart strings."

Ellert got his start in health care at age 16 when he worked as an orderly in a nursing home in Avilla that was operated by the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart. He was so impressed by their kindness and compassion, as well as their personal approach to health care, that he joined the Franciscan Friars of the Third Order Regular two years later and found his vocation and his mission with the homeless.

After earning a bachelor's degree in nursing from Catholic University of America in Washington, and a master's degree in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Ellert became a pediatric nurse practitioner. He was assigned to a friar house in Wilmington, Del., that worked with hundreds of homeless persons who had an array of health problems and social challenges.

Ellert says that he became a family physician by accident. He was preparing to work in a Franciscan mission in Ascension, Paraguay, when Franciscan officials decided against sending more American brothers there and asked him what he wanted to do. Ellert told them he wanted to go to medical school and become a family physician with more advanced skills.

A medical degree "would give me a level of independence that would allow me to go to more underserved areas and provide me with certain skills," he says. "I was very interested in being a family physician, in working with families. For me there is no specialty other than family medicine. It meets the most needs of the most people."

So the Franciscans financed his education, first at the School of Medicine at University College Cork, Ireland, and later at Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy in Rootstown. Ellert completed his family medicine residency at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, Fairview.

As a new family physician, he returned to Wilmington to be the assistant director of the family practice residency program at St. Francis Hospital. Outside of the hospital, he continued to provide care for the homeless living with AIDS as medical adviser at the House of Joseph II shelter. He also became the founder and medical director of Centro de la Esperanza Health Services, a family medicine office he established in cooperation with St. Francis Hospital to serve Mexican migrants and their families.

By the year 2000, however, Ellert had reached a turning point. He was becoming more involved in family medicine, and says he had to make a choice between the spiritual life of a friar and the medical life.

"My calling was more toward the work than the spiritual life of the monastery. I opted to leave the order" with the Franciscans' permission, he says. He moved to Phoenix to become chair of family and community medicine at Maricopa Integrated Health System, or MIHS.

There, he shared his vision of developing a fellowship program for advanced hospital practice and created a first-of-its-kind fellowship program for advanced hospital practice for family physicians. The two-year fellowship program gives family physicians advanced skills in obstetrics, pediatrics and intensive care, as well as in diagnostic procedures, such as colonoscopy, esophagogastroduodenoscopy and stress testing. It allows physicians to work as hospitalists and also to bring advanced techniques to underserved areas, Ellert says.

He hopes to start a similar program as the associate director of the family medicine program at St. Joseph Hospital in Phoenix, a position to which he recently moved.

"Family physicians provide the majority of rural and underserved care in the nation. If they don't feel comfortable with these advanced skills, access in these areas will decrease," says Ellert, whose contributions also got him selected as the 2008 Arizona Family Physician of the Year.

Colleagues at MIHS admired his skills and compassionate and giving ways so much that they prominently displayed "WWBD" -- What Would Bill Do? -- on bulletin boards there.

Other colleagues are equally glowing. The 2006 AAFP Family Physician of the Year, Adele O'Sullivan, M.D., calls him "a tireless advocate for our homeless patients." She and Ellert work together at Circle the City, a nonprofit organization that is trying to raise money for a recuperative care center where homeless people who are ill can be treated after they leave the hospital.

Ellert is eloquent when he encapsulates the aspirations of his family medicine career in the teaching hospital, the community clinic, the homeless shelter and the open road. "I hope that I have been successful in communicating…that health care is a vocation, a ministry, a sacred place to touch people's lives, and to bring healing and health in every sense of those words."