HJAR Sep/Oct 2022

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS I  SEP / OCT 2022 17 Smyth It goes back to what I really believe is our largest issue facing medicine, par- ticularly academic medicine, which are the tremendous disparities that exist today with health and health outcomes. I’m just going to go onto a little bit of an aside — if you look over the last 40 years at the tre- mendous strides that have occurred in my profession of cardiovascular disease, there has been a dramatic reduction in death from heart disease, and there are now treatments that allow people to live with things that were unheard of when I was in training. We now have more adults with congenital heart disease for the first time ever than we have children with congenital heart disease, because they’re able to live longer. And yet, when we look across the United States, there are pockets of the country that have not had those dramatic improvements and where the numbers really have not changed. In some cases, some of the areas, for example, in Appalachia, the numbers have actually gotten worse, whereas the rest of the country has gotten better in terms of mortality. So, we have to fundamentally fig- ure out how we are addressing those dis- parities and getting to all of our communi- ties the improvements that some of us have benefited from in the last 30 or 40 years. It’s true not just for cardiovascular disease, but across the spectrum. As more treatments and preventive strategies become avail- able, we have to be able to work out how we get them into some of these hard-to- reach areas. We’ve not been able to do that, so we can’t do it by just continuing what we’ve always done. We have to figure out a way to have a cadre of our workforce that can help us reach some of those communities. There is data that individuals do better when they feel as though they’re being treated by somebody like them. And so, I agree that we want highly qualified individuals who are incredibly capable of delivering the most outstanding care. In different settings, that may be different individuals. In my own field of cardiology, we have a real issue in terms of the number of women that are in the field. We are ranked third for the least women. We follow neurosurgery and orthopedics, and we are tied with urol- ogy. I find it impossible to believe that there aren’t women who are every bit as capable of delivering heart care as men. There are systems issues that I think have prevented women from coming into the field that fun- damentally need to be addressed. Editor But do you think that a woman doctor is going to be better than a male doctor? Smyth So there actually some interest- ing articles around that, which actually do suggest that women tend to spend more time with their patients, tend to listen more to their patients, and actually have better patient outcomes. 17 MAR / APR 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS   Susan Smyth, MD, PhD (right), discusses the development of atherosclerosis with her lab team members. Standing, from left, are: Rushita Bagchi, PhD, assistant professor, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine; Desislava Marinkova Kaloyanov, PhD, postdoctoral fellow; and Lauren Havens, BA, research associate. Seated at the computer is research associate Grace Purvis, MS.