Sister Adele O'Sullivan Serves Up Compassion

Check out the May issue of Reader's Digest -- the "America's 100 Best 2006" special issue -- and read about Sister Adele O'Sullivan, C.S.J., M.D., who was named "best good Samaritan" by the magazine.

In "Street Medicine," Reader's Digest chronicles O'Sullivan's talent for providing health care while making personal connections with homeless people in the Phoenix area "who desperately need treatment within a system that has traditionally never put out the welcome mat."

It's a year of honors for the family physician. Last fall, O'Sullivan, who belongs to the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, received AAFP's 2006 Family Physician of the Year award during the AAFP Annual Assembly in San Francisco.

Through her work as medical director for Maricopa County's Health Care for the Homeless Program, O'Sullivan treats nearly 3,000 patients each year in the program's clinic. But she touches countless others by taking her talents and her portable drugstore on the road several days a week seeking those who need her services at "the soup kitchens, the resource centers, the streets," according to the article.

O'Sullivan credits her father for teaching her to respect all human beings. She remembers him feeding hungry homeless people who knocked on the front door by bagging up food staples from the family's kitchen cupboards. No one was ever turned away, recalls O'Sullivan. "I wanted to be like that. Quiet and good," she says in the story.

This is the second consecutive year that Reader's Digest has chosen AAFP's Family Physician of the Year for its "best of" issue. In May 2005, the publication introduced its nearly 10 million readers to FP Richard Paris, M.D., of Hailey, Idaho, and ran a feature story on him in July.