I decided to become a doctor while sitting with our family physician in his office reading X-rays. With his guidance and the 200 percent support of my Irish immigrant parents, I graduated from Georgetown University School of Medicine. During my pediatric training, I learned that I had a talent for teaching, so at the end of five years of effort, I decided to look for a position that would allow me to teach and to see patients. My appointment to the NYU Langone faculty, which began September 10, 1975, fulfilled both goals, as well as giving me academic credentials when I testified in child maltreatment cases. In my career, I have testified more than a thousand times.
I was the medical director of the Community Medicine course located in the dean’s office for seven years, during which I developed a 35-hour didactic course covering topics ranging from drug use to medical care legislation to ethics, with a four-week experience at community sites for all the first-year students.
In the Pediatric Ambulatory Service at Bellevue, I was a member of the adolescent team and a preceptor in the house staff continuity clinic. I developed several initiatives in the clinic, namely the adolescent gynecologic clinic, the adolescent parenting program that expanded to the adolescent prenatal program, and a specialized program to evaluate children who may have been sexually abused. This latter clinic was the only resource in New York City for such evaluations for several years. It was also the impetus for the development of an identifiable location for all child protection activities: this is now the Child Protection and Development Program, the first such program in a public hospital in the United States.
I developed a child protection team to provide 24/7 coverage for evaluation of possible cases. The team meets weekly to review all the reported cases and to provide a forum to discuss high-risk cases in the hopes of avoiding a report to Child Protective Services. As the director of the team, I represented our work in city, state and national arenas, including as a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Child Abuse. I authored a protocol for the identification and reporting of child abuse that was published by the New York State Departments of Health and Social Services, the first such protocol in the United States. For the past 15 years, I have been the senior medical consultant for a unique program in which nurse practitioners are located in the community-based offices of New York City’s Child Protection Services to provide medical consultations for the child protection staff.
I was also a medical provider at the free-standing adolescent program The Door for 40 years, acting as a conduit for adolescents who needed a higher level of care and for adolescents who had difficulty functioning in large healthcare systems.
I have now reached 80 years old and am happy to be able to continue to do my life’s work seeing patients, especially adolescent mothers.
