Medical student Fatoumata Nogoy Bah was all set to finish her final year at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and go through the normal process of what many medical students do: send out invitations for graduation, get ready for residency, etc.
But instead, Bah has fast-forwarded her life and is now working in a hospital on the front lines against the coronavirus pandemic. In a clip on Good Morning America, she felt like she was “sitting on the sidelines.”
So the 26-year-old Bah graduated from medical school more than a month early and volunteered to immediately start working as a medical doctor at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is filling a need not only in the medical community against the coronavirus, she’s also fulfilling the need for more Black doctors.
Roughly 6 percent of physicians and surgeons are black, even as African-Americans continue to struggle with a range of negative health outcomes compared with whites.
More evidence comes from a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper indicating African-American men are more likely to feel comfortable with – and take health cues from – doctors who look like them. The findings also suggest that increased screening by a more diverse doctor workforce could help close the life expectancy gap between white and black men. And female African-American doctors represent about two percent of the nation’s 877,616 active physicians.
Another thing to note is that women physicians earn 64 cents for every dollar that a man earns. That’s across the board. Seventy-eight percent of women make up the healthcare profession, but only 5 percent sit on a major board.
Yet despite the numbers, Bah is determined, equipped and ready to take the challenge head on like the superhero she is.
After her virtual graduation ceremony on Zoom, bah started less than a week later at UMass Memorial Medical Center, starting off in telemedicine, among other things, so that she could treat patients diagnosed with COVID-19.
Massachusetts has been a hotbed for COVID-19 positive patients with the state seeing more than 28,000 cases according to the state’s Department of Public Health.
According to ABCNews.com, Bah works on the hospital’s COVID-19 floor, but is in an office where she…… communicates with patients by phone and video. Only one attending doctor is allowed physically on the floor in order to minimize the risk of spreading the virus, according to Bah.
In July, Bah will begin her residency in anesthesiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, located in New York City, another city that has seen a surging number of coronavirus patients and deaths.
Bah shared that she works nearly five shifts a week on the COVID-19 floor of UMass. But although she may be tired, she finds peace in knowing that she’s making a difference.
“If you had told me a few months ago that this is what I’d be doing right now, I’d look at you like you were crazy,” Bah told “Good Morning America.” “This was just not what we had expected.”
Not expected, but needed.
“I feel like I’m finding my purpose and I’m able to help in whatever ways that I can,” she said.
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