Chithra Perumalswami, MD, knew early on what she wanted to do with her life. As a teenager, she volunteered in an ED and with a hospice group, volunteerism that continued throughout her education. When she graduated from high school, she was tapped for Brown University’s Program in Liberal Medical Education, which calls itself the only baccalaureate-MD program in the Ivy League. And though she eventually turned down the offer, she pursued dual majors in cellular and molecular biology and English at the University of Michigan, where she earned her medical degree in 2004 and completed her residency.
In 2009, she participated in the Palliative Care Education and Practice Program at Harvard Medical School in Boston, a two-week post-graduate course aimed at professional development for physicians dedicated to careers in palliative-care education. “I really found that there were just so many aspects to caring for a patient as a palliative-care specialist and as a hospitalist that really strike at the heart of what being a doctor is,” says Dr. Perumalswami, assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Hospital Medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago and one of four new members of Team Hospitalist. “I think it’s been an interest I’ve always had. During my residency training, I definitely experienced quite a few patient cases where I felt that we really needed to help patients and their families, and I didn’t necessarily have the best skill set to do that until I had more experience and more training.”
Dr. Perumalswami now wants to get better at her craft.
“As an academic hospitalist, it’s not just about doing research and writing papers and seeing papers,” she says, “but it’s also developing those leadership skills and helping that become an integral part of the educational experience.”
Question: What drew you to a career in HM?
Answer: I chose a career in academic hospital medicine primarily because I enjoy taking care of acutely ill, hospitalized, adult patients. I also really enjoy teaching medical students, residents, and fellows, and I enjoy doing that in the hospital setting. I think that there’s great satisfaction from taking care of a patient from admission to discharge.… I enjoyed every aspect of internal medicine, and when I graduated, I thought I could choose a subspecialty, but I felt that my skills and my expertise was really in taking care of the hospitalized patient.
Q: You have sought out extra training in palliative care and pain management. How has that impacted your career?
A: It’s not something that I necessarily started out thinking that I would specialize in, but the more I took care of hospitalized patients, the more I realized that we actually take care of a fair number of patients who have really complex symptom needs, and also really have a lot of needs with regard to recognizing when their prognosis is poor and understanding what their options are, if they’re even amenable to a palliative approach. I really felt that that was a skill that I needed to fine-tune. So I ended up gaining enough clinical experience and participating with hospice patients to the point where that’s really supplemented my hospitalist career, because what I found is that it’s made me a better hospitalist, and being a hospitalist has made me a better palliative-care doc.
Q: Working in academia, there’s no way to escape talk of the duty-hour rules recently put in place. What’s your view on the issue?
A: My view is that the work hours are here to stay. I think that there are some definite benefits that we’ve gained from having work hours. I’d say first and foremost of those gains is public trust. I think most physicians will tell you that they don’t want a physician who’s in the 36th hour of their day taking care of them when we know that studies actually can demonstrate that when you’ve been awake that long, that your cognitive abilities decline.
