University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: February 2, 2006

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Contributor

The nontraditional career path taken by Kim Griswold has led the UB medical school faculty member to a nomination for a prestigious award from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Kim Griswold was nominated by her students to receive the Humanism in Medicine Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI

Griswold, associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine, School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, was among only 40 individuals nominated nationwide for the Humanism in Medicine Award. Her achievement was recognized last fall in a full-page announcement in USA Today.

"It's so meaningful because it's the students you actually work with and teach" who nominated her for the award, she says.

Students are directed to select caring and compassionate teacher-mentors devoted to patient-centered medicine. Griswold's dedication to teaching is clear, as is her commitment to research and working with neglected patient populations.

Yet, Griswold developed her interest in health care and medicine after starting on a very different career path. She grew up in Texas with a desire to act. After graduating from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., with a degree in theater arts, she took a job with a summer stock company in Virginia, playing the maid in "Tartuffe." She later relocated to Massachusetts to be near her parents and worked at the Boston Repertory Company.

Today, Griswold draws on her early acting experiences in her role as a faculty member at UB.

"You take your response from your patients," she says. Good actors work from genuine emotions, she explains. "I think I have used a lot of that in interactions with patients."

Her acting career was cut short by two crises, however, which, she says, "turned the trajectory of my life around." First, her mother fell ill with breast cancer and she moved home to help care for her. Then, around the time her mother passed away, she was in a serious horseback-riding accident.

Griswold spent about six weeks in the hospital. "One of the doctors taking care of me suggested I might think about a career in nursing, which had never occurred to me in my life," she says. But as she recovered, she says she reflected on the wonderful care her mother had received from nurses and doctors, and which she was experiencing in the hospital as well.

"It all sort of coalesced in my mind and made an impression," she says. "I thought maybe I could be a nurse and do some good."

The academic requirements to enter a nursing program presented a challenge, Griswold notes. She had fulfilled the science requirement at Bard with a history and philosophy course in alchemy. After studying math and science at Northeastern and Harvard, she entered a two-year nursing program at Syracuse University. She then found a job at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Griswold worked as a nurse in the neurology department for about five years when a doctor at the hospital suggested she get a medical degree. Instead, she researched other options and enrolled in Yale University to pursue a master's degree in public health. While there, she developed an interest in displaced and marginal populations. She work on a project involving the psychiatric treatment of prisoners and spent 10 months in Oxford studying the health care of the chronically sick at the Radcliffe Infirmary.

Her father, meanwhile, relocated to Buffalo after remarrying and worked as a clergyman at St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral. He suggested she search for employment in the city. Griswold secured a job writing grant proposals for the UB School of Health Related Professions—now the School of Public Health and Health Professions—and garnered a three-year grant with the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. She later taught a course in research methods and became involved with the Department of Family Medicine.

Griswold says she missed the contact with patients, however. She approached David Holden, former chair of the Department of Family Medicine, about working flex-time so she could study for her doctorate. He proposed instead that she pursue a medical degree, in which case she could take all the time she needed.

Griswold credits Holden and Roseanne Berger, associate dean for graduate medical education in the medical school, with being among the mentors who encouraged her on the road to a medical degree.

It took several years at UB and D'Youville College to take all the additional science courses needed to enter medical school, Griswold said. She was admitted to the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB in 1990, graduated four years later and was offered a job in the Department of Family Medicine after her residency.

A medical degree has enabled Griswold to combine her interests in public health, medicine, research and education. "I still love research and I do it, but I love the teaching," she says. "Being a faculty member in Family Medicine, you have the opportunity to do all of the above." She also cares for a panel of patients as a clinical professor. "It's a wonderful combination," she says.

As a UB faculty member, Griswold has secured grants to benefit both refugees and psychiatric patients through research projects and clinical care. She spends about half her time teaching medical residents and students at Buffalo General Hospital or with the Refugee Cultural Competency Training Program at Niagara Family Health Center on Niagara Street in Buffalo, a project she developed that familiarizes medical students with patients from other cultures and provides treatment to a population often in need of care. It is funded through a three-year, $393,933 grant she secured from the New York State Department of Health.

In addition, Griswold studies the benefits of connecting emergency room psychiatric patients with primary-care physicians. She developed that project through a four-year, $300,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

"You learn from every single venue that you're in," Griswold says. "I learn from the patients, I learn from the medical students and I learn from residents. We learn together."

A willingness to learn has driven Griswold in her professional and personal life alike. She continues to pursue acting and says interests outside medicine provide an important outlet to deal with some of the difficult experiences doctors face.

"Medicine can be a little overwhelming sometimes," she says. She also rides horses and owns two black labs that she shows at obedience competitions and takes to nursing homes and hospitals.

There has been something to learn from each step on the journey, says Griswold.

"I really don't regret any facet of my education or my experience because I think all of it makes the robust whole," she says. "I think I would have been less of a teacher or a doctor if I hadn't had these other experiences."