26-04-2025
Meet Dr. Amanda Whitehouse, medicine's gift to Mason Square in Springfield
SPRINGFIELD – Baystate Health's Mason Square Neighborhood Health Center serves people in an asthma capital where poor access to fresh foods and chronic stress exacerbate common ailments.
So volunteers start community gardens. They work to improve education.
'The solutions live in this community,' said Dr. Amanda Whitehouse. 'My job is to keep those people healthy.'
Baystate Health oversees medical offices in Mason Square that bring convenient care to a historically underserved Black community. Whitehouse will soon join that cause.
On a recent morning, the health center was busy, but not overwhelmed, with patients in waiting room chairs filling out forms. There were meetings and consultations.
Whitehouse, 33, who calls herself a 'Springfield convert,' is part of the inaugural 2017 class of University of Massachusetts T. H. Chan School of Medicine students who took classroom and lab training in Worcester, but got their first taste of talking with people at Baystate Health in Springfield.
That's a needed change of pace from the lab, the library and the lecture hall.
'They mean it to say to you 'This is why you are doing this. This is why you want to be a doctor,'' she said.
What she learned was the importance of context.
'It doesn't help for me tell people they should eat more fresh vegetables,' she said. 'If they live in a food desert and can't get them.'
But it does help if she knows that white rice is a big part of a patient's traditional diet. Would they consider switching to brown rice, or to a rice made of cauliflower?'
Even the study of dermatology needs to adjust. Common rashes look different on darker skin compared with textbooks photos of white people.
Whitehouse has about two months left as a medicine-pediatrics resident at Baystate Health. In September, she'll return to Baystate's Mason Square Neighborhood Health Center and start her career as a primary care physician.
By practicing in Springfield she'll help address a chronic shortage of primary care physicians. She'll also fulfill one of the goals of the medical school program that brought her to Springfield: to help address the physician shortage by expanding the supply of doctors here.
A study released three months ago by the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission found that although the state has the highest total physicians per capita, it has the fifth-lowest share of all physicians who work in primary care and few new physicians are going into that area of practice.
The share of primary care physicians in direct patient care as a share of total physicians declined between 2014 and 2020 from 26.7% to 24.7%. The share of specialty physicians increased from 69% to 70.7%.
Forty-one percent of respondents told the Massachusetts Center for Health Information Analysis in 2023 they had difficulty accessing care, with the most-cited reason being inability to get an appointment.
Whitehouse said that when she returns to work as a doctor, she can expect to care for about 1,000 patients.
'This work is not easy,' she said.
Whitehouse said she knows of fellow doctors — 'people fully enmeshed in the health care system' — who also have trouble getting appointments.
Whitehouse worked with the Baystate Springfield Educational Partnership, getting high schoolers interested in health care.
Whitehouse's medical school program, known as Population-based Urban and Rural Community Health, enrolls 25 to 30 students each year.
'Some of us stayed,' Whitehouse said. 'More of us should stay.'
But there are factors that make it difficult to recruit, and to keep, primary care doctors. Some are drawn into fellowships where they get more training for lucrative specialties. Some are drawn to big cities.
'That's the thing with residents, sometimes,' she said, referring to doctors starting out. 'Everyone comes together and then goes back to where they are from.'
She grew up in Braintree and earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan. Whitehouse said she likes the region's lifestyle options. She lives in West Springfield and enjoys the outdoors and hiking with her dog.
The combined medicine-pediatrics program means she'll treat both adults and children, with an emphasis on children. The only people who fall outside her scope as a primary care doctor are patients who are pregnant.
'I tell them to bring their baby back to see me,' Whitehouse said.
For neighborhoods in and around Mason Square, the doctoring that Whitehouse brings will build upon health solutions in place, including Gardening in the Community. That project not only grows fruits and vegetables, but has a youth training program that teaches young people how to raise produce. The organization runs a farm store just a few blocks away at 200 Walnut St.
Fifty or so people participate each week in a maternal health program – with advice on getting through postpartum and on building strength through exercise or senior fitness chair aerobics at the Bay Area Neighborhood Council, said president Gwendolyn Smith.
'It means a lot,' Smith said.
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Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.
