Student Leader Hopes to Match Grandfather’s Impact

“He lived long enough to see my MCAT scores, so he knew I scored in the 95th percentile,” said Dhaliwal, a fourth-year student at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, who will learn which family medicine residency program she matched with this week. “He was pretty happy about that, but that was all that he got to see.”

Moyers, who died in 2019 at age 90, practiced family medicine in the Pennsylvania communities of Conneaut Lake and Meadville for more than three decades. After retiring, he continued to serve his community by volunteering at a free clinic until he was well into his 80s.

“He practiced until he couldn’t walk,” Dhaliwal said. “He was incredible, but his legacy was so much more than the work he did with his patients. It’s also the work that he did in his community. When my grandfather died, the whole community showed up at his funeral.”

Moyers was a church elder, served on the school board and worked as chief medical officer of the local medical center. He served as president of the county and state medical societies and represented his state as an AMA delegate for decades. Moyers also donated lakefront property to the community with the stipulation that it be maintained for public use.

“When I think about the type of impact that I want to have, that is exactly it,” Dhaliwal said. “That’s why I want to go rural. That’s why I want to practice in a small town where there’s not so much red tape that I can’t get involved and I’m not so overworked, exhausted and burned out by corporate medicine that I don’t have time to serve on a school board. Those things really matter, and my grandpa somehow did it all because he lived in a small town and made sure that he held on to those values.”

Dhaliwal already is charting her own leadership path in family medicine, serving as the student member of the Ohio AFP Board of Directors. At the national level, she was a student delegate to the AAFP Congress of Delegates and is now a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Health of the Public and Science.

“Family medicine has supported and nourished me every step of the way,” she said. “And I think the biggest takeaway from my leadership experiences has been more love for the world of family medicine and gratitude for the fact that our specialty insists on having a voice in all of these spaces. I appreciate that in these discussions, it always comes back to, ‘What do our communities need? What do our patients need?’”

Dhaliwal is a scholar in the Department of Veterans Affairs Health Professional Scholarship Program and will owe five years of service when her training is completed. First, she hopes to match in a rural family medicine program this week.

“After getting that broad-spectrum, rural, unopposed training with my hands on every single patient and doing all the things for three years, I plan to complete an addiction medicine fellowship,” she said. “And then I’m thinking of working for the VA somewhere in Appalachia and doing addiction medicine, integrative medicine and primary care. I’ll do that for five years, and that will be really good because I’ll get my sea legs, so to speak, and practice without the pressure of learning how to run my own business.”

After her VA service, Dhaliwal will open her own direct primary care practice. She’ll speak on DPC in rural and underserved areas during the annual meeting of the Rural Medical Training Collaborative (formerly RTT Collaborative), April 10-12 in Asheville, N.C.

“I know so many physicians who have made that transition,” she said. “My primary care physician actually started her DPC right out of residency this past year, and she’s doing great.”

Dhaliwal will spend Match Day in Vermont, on her second rotation in the DPC practice of Umair Mailk, M.D.

“They’re taking more patients than usual this month so I can see a lot of my own patients,” she said. “I’m really excited and glad to be with his patients in his community.”

In addition to her maternal grandfather, Dhaliwal is following her father into medicine. And like her grandfather, radiation oncologist Ranjit Singh Dhaliwal, M.D., won’t get to see his daughter match. He passed in 2013 from pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 65, when Dhaliwal was a freshman in college.

“My dad held space for people who were going through cancer, and for their families,” she said. “I remember when he died, people would come to our house and bring casseroles. People would stop us and say, ‘Your dad took such great care of my aunt.’ My grandfather and my dad were so fulfilled by the work that they did, as exhausting as it was for them, because they held space for people who were suffering. Medicine really aligned with me in that way. The work of my lifetime needs to be relational, in person, and tangible. I need to be able to see the effects of my work in the people around me and go home at night knowing I helped somebody today.”

Ranjit Dhaliwal, M.D., spent part of his career teaching at the University of California-Davis, and Moyers precepted medical students in his community. Olivia spent two years before entering medical school teaching high school on the Rosebud Indian (Sioux) Reservation in South Dakota through Teach for America. She hopes mentoring will be part of her medical career, too.

“If you want to change the world, you have to work with young people, because otherwise the work ends with you,” she said. “Without their influence, you also run the risk of becoming oblivious to the things that really matter.”