Repost of a post I wrote for the Global Health Diaries, the blog of the Global Health Program at the University of Vermont Robert Larner M.D. College of Medicine and the Western Connecticut Health Network. Find the original here.

“Here, you can just about always find an internal medicine resident who speaks the patient’s language,” the resident I was working with said, smiling, “It’s amazing.” Another resident had just stopped by to say that one of their colleagues did, in fact, speak that obscure Southern Asian language the translation service did not cover that they needed for an acute patient. I smiled because it was amazing. This was exactly the type of place I’d wanted to train to become a physician.

It was standard that everyone on my teams during my internal medicine rotation had a different accent. And when two of us did have the same accent, our divergent places of origin and cultural backgrounds made up for the lack of difference in how our English sounded. What I liked most, was that in this hospital everyone came from different places – the patients, the nurses, the residents, the physicians, and the other hospital staff. Even in modern America, it’s somewhat uncommon to work in a hospital where the physician diversity almost reflects the diversity of the patients. The hospital where I did my internal medicine rotation in Connecticut was very close to having its physicians reflect the different groups of people who made up the greater community of the hospital.

One thing I found interesting upon returning to Vermont after almost a decade away was how much I missed the accents and the challenge of finding connection across cultural differences I’d experienced during my years in the Washington, DC and Paraguay. There was a subtle feeling of stagnation, almost boredom that crept into my professional life as I began my medical career in my home state. Of course, Vermont has pockets of diversity of all kinds but it’s not like living in an urban area or a foreign country.

After my second year of medical school, I moved to LCOM’s Connecticut campus. As I settled into my new community, I learned that where I lived in Connecticut was a melting pot that buzzed and hummed in ways that more homogenous communities do not.

What better time to dive into a diverse medical community than right after the release of the COVID vaccines? As I listened to the accents of the residents and attending physicians with whom I worked during my Connecticut internal medicine rotation, I was struck by how the medical community is just as connected as the general human community is connected. Afterall, COVID has definitively illustrated how communicable diseases can spread easily around the world. But, also, the speedy development and dissemination of the COVID vaccine showed how we humans can solve dire problems when the minds of people all around the world come together.

There was something unique about how my internal medicine teams came together to solve patient problems. Of course, good medicine transcends culture – some medications and interventions just work. But, in terms of decisions about how to interact with patients and their families, each of us brought our own cultural beliefs and backgrounds to our practice of medicine.

One of the neatest things about working with team members who aren’t like you, is that you’re forced to reflect on your own ways. You’re forced to examine other ways of being. And, in medical school where it’s easy to get caught up in the nitty-gritty of disease states and medication dosages – I was grateful to be reminded of the humanness of the residents and attending physicians around me. And, also, to be reminded that my patients brought their humanity with them when they came to the hospital.

Most of the hours spent on internal medicine were dedicated to identifying the best course of treatment for our patients. But as rounds ended for the day, there was often the lucky opportunity to hear what medical school was like in other countries and how physicians from all round the world had come to find themselves in Connecticut. The walls of the hospital seemed less limiting when I realized that it had taken a global community to staff the hospital itself.