Close Up
Overseeing graduate medical education
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“By creating a strong academic medical center, we’ll have a critical mass of faculty and be able to make intelligent decisions about where residents will receive the best experience.”
Roseanne Berger grew up in a household that also served as the practice for her father, a general practitioner in Yonkers, N.Y., who tended to his patients for decades, delivering their babies and performing minor surgeries.
Inspired by his example, she became a family physician and continues his legacy of community care, albeit on a different scale. As senior associate dean for graduate medical education, Berger presides over nearly 800 residents who are training in 63 programs sponsored by UB in hospitals throughout the community. “The UB faculty are based in those hospitals that serve as the laboratory for training residents,” she says.
Berger did her initial training in family medicine at UB in the late 1970s where she met her husband, Daniel Morelli, now chief medical officer at Buffalo General Hospital. After a brief stay in San Diego, they returned to the area and joined the UB faculty, working as faculty members in a community-based, model family medicine program.
Berger moved to the School of Medicine on the South Campus in 1992 to help coordinate a course in community-oriented primary care involving internal medicine, pediatrics and family medicine. It was the first time that all three departments had worked together to train students in primary care, and the success of the course led then medical school Dean John Naughton to ask Berger to head the new graduate medical education office that was being established.
“When I first started, the training was primarily hospital-based. Now, hospitals are very different places than they were 15 or 20 years ago. More training occurs in ambulatory settings,” she observes, “and professionalism, communication and health care system issues, such as patient safety, are explicitly taught. The challenge for us is to be sure that the quality and education is maintained across all those settings.”
To help ensure high standards, Berger serves on New York State’s Council on Graduate Medical Education.
She feels that the newly formed Great Lakes Health System of Western New York, which unites Kaleida Health, Erie County Medical Center, UB and members of the community, will strengthen the residency programs.
“I think it’s creating a wonderful opportunity because most of our residents are rotating through multiple hospitals,” she says. “By creating a strong academic medical center, we’ll have a critical mass of faculty and be able to make intelligent decisions about where residents will receive the best experience.”
A passion of Berger’s has been the coordination of the Mini-Medical School at UB, a series of lectures and programs on issues of health care and medical research that attracts audiences in the hundreds, ranging from high school students to people in their 80s. Berger gauges interest in topics and invites UB faculty members in clinical and basic sciences to share their knowledge and enthusiasm for their subjects in a straightforward, often lighthearted manner.
“It’s a chance for UB to reach out to the community and share some of its expertise with the public. People are very interested in health care and medical research. They’re laughing, responding, asking good questions,” she explains. “The evening is education, but it’s also entertainment. The audience and faculty walk away feeling energized.”
One of her goals is to use the Mini-Medical School as an enticement for people to go into the health care field. “I’d like to see the high school and UB college students’ enrollment grow,” she says.
In addition to this wide spectrum of outreach, Berger continues to maintain a primary care family medicine practice. “It’s limited, but my patients tolerate it because I’ve known them for a long time,” she remarks, not unlike the longtime care dispensed by her father a few generations ago.
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