Ariell Rose DeSure (BS, Public Health 2013) spends 40 to 80 hours a week caring for hundreds of hospitalized patients. She just began her third year at the UW School of Medicine, where she hopes to pursue a career in pediatrics or family medicine.
“I’m excited by the opportunity to build relationships with patients and apply my public health background to direct patient care,” DeSure says.
After graduating summa cum laude from the School, DeSure took a gap year to join AmeriCorps. She worked as a case manager at Neighborcare Health and Ballard Homeless Clinic, experiences she says trained her “to see patients within the context of their community and environment.”
DeSure remembers helping a man with epilepsy sign up for Medicaid. “He hadn’t been able to afford his seizure medication for years,” DeSure says. “He feared having a seizure in public, not because of the health consequences, but because he was afraid of the cost of an ambulance ride to the hospital.” Once he was approved, he finally got the medicine he needed to keep his disease under control.
“Sometimes in medical education we can become so focused on the disease that we forget to see the patient holistically,” DeSure says. “Public health education has given me the skills to more effectively care for patients by identifying the social and economic factors that contribute to their illness.”
In her free time, DeSure enjoys climbing the basalt cliffs and volcanic tuffs of Smith Rock in Bend, Oregon.