Physician Assistant Wendy
Simons
by Tom Kertes
“I know I can’t change the world,” Wendy
Simons says. “But how does that Talmudic statement go? ‘If
you touch one life you can make a difference in the world.’ You
really can’t ask much more in life.”
Simons, as a Physician Assistant
(P.A.) at New Dorp High School on Staten Island, touches
many lives. “In my job you
have high points every single day,” she says. “You
do a lot of hugging, a lot of kissing—teenagers are like
that. But, really, every time a student comes to me and says
something like “I want to thank you for taking care of
my girlfriend” or ‘I’m now ready to follow
the diet log you told me about two years ago for my diabetes’,
it’s a victory.”
“People are very scared of giving children autonomy
in any form—so teenagers often tell us what they don’t
tell anyone else, including their parents,” adds Simons. “What
we want to do is develop better continuity and self-control
in the students. And if we can have that type of close communication,
that’s half the battle won.”
Simons’ program, run by Staten Island University Hospital,
is the only one of its kind in the borough. It deals with 14
different areas of care for New Dorp’s 1,800 students,
including birth control, health and sexuality, school counseling,
smoking, vision, blood pressure screening, referral to outside
agencies, and complete medical checkups. In order for the clinic
to be able to treat the child, parents must give their consent
for care separately in each area. “Most give a general
consent—and that is a great thing because this School
Health Clinic has been able to increase the number of students
who finish school,” she says. “And that’s
because we intimately address every issue of adolescence. Thus
we’re able to deal with areas of mental or physical health
that often prevent kids from graduating—and make a timely
intervention.”
The Clinic has been doing its essential
work for 12 years now, but with the City budget cuts no one
knows how much longer it can remain in existence. “That’s the terrible
reality—our funds have been cut severely over the years
and the Health Care system for adolescents stinks,” says
Simons. “There’s one program like this in every
borough. In an ideal world, there would be a school-based health
center such as this in every single school.”
Simons, who has been deeply involved
with caring for others since her early childhood—“I always used to bring
injured pets or people home, driving my parents crazy” she
says—earned a bachelors’ degree in nursing from
Cornell University. But after working for the military in Germany,
at Bremerhaven Hospital, for four years, then at St. Vincent’s
Hospital on Staten Island as a floor nurse, she “was
frustrated. I wanted to do more.” The United States Public
Health Service had a program training Physician Assistants—and
not an easy one, either. “They told me, ‘you are
a mother with a couple of kids, you won’t have the time,
you’ll never make it’,” says Simons. “I
said ‘let me worry about that.’
Physician Assistants, as opposed
to nurses, are experts in a particular area of medicine,
always working under the direction of a physician, whereas
Nurse Practitioners are independent workers. P.A.s can prescribe
drugs, give injections, and, in New York State at least,
can do anything delegated to them by a doctor. Though still
a somewhat obscure profession to the general public, “P. A.s have been around for about
30 years, basically developing as a separate discipline from
nursing as an offshoot of the Vietnam war,” says Simons.
Simons’ program, besides taking care of the 1,800 New
Dorp students, is also training college student P.A. residents
who intend to enter the profession in the future. “To
prepare for becoming a P.A., it has to be almost all hands-on,” she
says. “There’s no such thing as distance training
on the internet for this profession. It’s all about dealing
with people—and at an extremely sensitive age, too.”
A P.A. in adolescent medicine can
communicate on an intimate level and be profoundly involved
with unique teenage problems. And, thanks to New York State
law, the Physician Assistant can do the job in complete confidence
as well. “We ask
questions doctors often don’t even think about and we
pass no moral judgment,” says Simons. The vast number
of students from foreign countries, about half the population
at New Dorp, present an extra challenge. “The cultural
and religious differences can be enormous,” says Simons. “It’s
difficult for the kids. Often it’s their first time in
the U.S. and things that were taboo before are now right out
in the open. But then they have to go home, to another world,
if you will. So we must be able to listen to their conflict
and try to mediate it.
“A couple of months ago a new student from Liberia,
came to see us,” says Simons. “Her birth certificate
said she was 16 years old. She looked 40. We examined her and
talked to her about things that needed to be talked about.
Then I saw her again last week and she looked fresh, happy
and wonderful—like a real sixteen-year old.
“It’s small victories like this that I experience
every day. It’s small victories that make it all worthwhile.”#
