2007 Family Physician of the Year Serves the Underserved

Steven Levin, M.D., medical director and sole physician at St. John’s Health Center in New Brunswick, N.J., won acclaim as the 2007 Family Physician of the Year during the AAFP Scientific Assembly’s opening ceremony on Sept. 28.

“From the moment I wanted to be a physician, I wanted to help people who didn’t have access to care. I don’t know where that came from,” said Levin in an interview before Assembly.

St. John’s, a clinic Catholic Charities created, gave Levin his first job 18 years ago. Still at St. John’s, Levin works with a patient base of uninsured and low-income patients daily. In fact, 70 percent to 80 percent of Levin’s patients meet those criteria.

“My most common patient is an uninsured, Spanish-speaking patient with uncontrolled diabetes and end-organ complications of the disease,” said Levin. “Right now I’m working with a patient who came to me on the verge of needing dialysis. She has problems with her eyes, her feet are numb from the diabetes, and I’m working with her every week to try to adjust her medications and get her diabetes under control. It’s a struggle.”

Levin works with a number of immigrant patients, and many of them are neither well educated nor accustomed to tracking health conditions. They often have difficulty charting blood sugar levels. Although Levin provides both written and spoken instructions in Spanish, he often gets back information that is incomplete. “It seems so plainly simple to me, but it’s not (to them),” said Levin.

Levin also regularly works with students and residents. Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Brunswick, where Levin is an associate professor, and two family medicine residencies send students and residents to St. John’s for family medicine training that features cultural competency, including the use of translators; serving the underserved; and accessing community resources.

Some of these students have been inspired by Levin’s example and have wanted to further help the underserved. Two projects have evolved. In the early 1990s, Levin helped students form UMDNJ’s Homeless and Indigent Population Health Outreach Project, or HIPHOP. In that program, students see Levin’s patients at St. John’s one night a week.

Levin recently worked with another group of “incredibly motivated” students to start The Promise Clinic, “which uses a better format,” said Levin: Each patient is assigned to a team of students during his or her first visit to St. John’s, and he or she can return to team members for later care.

Faculty, including Levin and his physician assistant, take turns supervising Promise Clinic students one night a week. “Ten of the 13 volunteer faculty members are family docs,” said Levin. “That’s the way family docs are.”

“So many doctors in the community here won’t see my patients for problems beyond the scope of family medicine; they won’t do any volunteer work — it’s a shame,” said Levin. “I want every student I come into contact with to see the tremendous needs these patients have and realize they could do a little volunteer work.”