Hawaii Doc Puts Focus on Growing Islands’ FP Workforce
Oct. 5, 2023, David Mitchell — Fortunately for the people of Hawaii, Jill Omori, M.D., followed her heart rather than questionable advice.
Omori pondered a few career paths as an undergraduate student at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Hawaii, including medicine and education. She was discouraged from pursuing medical school by a female physician at Davis who said it was too difficult to be both a mother and a doctor, and family and friends in the education field advised her not to follow them into teaching.
Omori, now a physician educator and mother of two, didn’t listen.
“There were some opportunities to teach in medical school, and I really liked doing that,” said Omori, associate professor of medical education and family medicine and community health at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “I had the opportunity to be a student tutor for our problem-based learning groups, and I continued to be a tutor as a resident. I have always liked the educational aspect of medicine. When I was graduating from residency, there was an opportunity for a faculty development fellowship with my residency. They knew I was interested in education and offered me the position.”
Omori was a clinic director and family medicine clerkship director at her alma mater early in her career before becoming associate director of the Office of Medical Education in 2006. She has been its director since 2016.
“I was working mainly with the residency program, so I still had a lot of clinical time and had my own patient panel,” she said. “I was doing in-patient care and even delivering babies. Over time I wanted to concentrate more on the medical students, especially when I started focusing on building curricula.”
Hawaii has nearly 1.5 million people spread across seven islands, but the Aloha State has less than 3,000 full-time physicians. The state estimates it needs nearly 800 more physicians to meet demand, and the most acute need is in primary care.
Omori’s pivot from residency faculty to student education means she now sees patients just one day a week at the student-run free clinic she founded in 2005 for patients experiencing houselessness.
“It’s not that I don’t like seeing patients, but I felt really strongly about contributing to the training of future physicians, especially for Hawaii,” said Omori, who advises her school’s family medicine interest group. “I felt like my reach to patients would be even greater if I was a teacher rather than a full-time practicing clinician.”
During the National Conference of Family Medicine Residents and Medical Students in July, Omori received the Joyce Jeardeau Memorial Award, which recognizes faculty or staff support of a family medicine interest group.
Grant Program Offers Funds for FMIGs
The Family Medicine Student Organization grant program is open, and family medicine interest groups are eligible to apply for two types of grants.
Applications for core grants, which support typical FMIG operations, will be reviewed each month through March 31, 2024.
Additionally, student organizations are eligible to apply for up to $500 in special grant funding to support a qualifying project that promotes family medicine. Projects are judged on creativity, collaboration and innovation. Special grant applications are reviewed on a rolling basis with the first deadline on Nov. 30, 2023. Later deadlines are Jan. 31 and March 31, 2024.
Visit the grant home page to learn more.
The John A. Burns School of Medicine’s FMIG launched a Neighbor Island Medical Scholars Program to address the physician shortage in the state’s rural areas and to help students from Hawaii’s neighbor islands have increased access to resources and mentoring to pursue careers in medicine. The program provides scholarships for high school students from five neighbor islands to come to Oahu for the Medical Diagnosis and Treatment Summer Program, which Omori described as a “taste of medical school.”
Scholarships cover travel, tuition, lodging and meals. The learning doesn’t stop at the end of the week-long program. Participants are paired with physicians to shadow on their home islands as well as medical student mentors who will follow them throughout high school and into college.
“This is to try to encourage our students from the neighbor islands to go into medicine,” Omori said of the project, which resulted from the FMIG’s participation in the Primary Care Leadership Collaborative. “They are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to resources and preparatory things like counseling and mentoring. We did a needs assessment of the students and the teachers out on the neighbor islands to see what would be most beneficial. This was our first year, and the students did a great job with it.”
In a nomination letter for the Jeardeau Award, students praised Omori for her work as director of the Houseless Outreach and Medical Education Project. Medical students are the primary clinicians at HOME, where family medicine and internal medicine residents also provide care as part of an elective.
Hawaii has the fourth-highest rate of homelessness in the nation, at 41 people per 1,000 residents.
“When I was a medical student, there were no significant rotations where we worked with the underserved, and certainly not the houseless themselves,” she said. “By the time I was a resident, the houseless population in Hawaii was growing significantly, and I didn’t feel like our school was doing enough to help that population. When I became faculty, I wanted to establish a formal curriculum in underserved care.”
Omori secured more than $500,000 in grants from the Health Resources and Services Administration to develop curriculum related to caring for underserved people. What started as a weekly clinic at one site has grown to include daily care at one permanent location and two mobile units that serve six other locations.
The program’s services have expanded to include weekly clinics for psychiatry and monthly specialty clinics for care related to women’s health, vision and dermatology. Omori received a $2.25 million grant that will allow HOME to provide dental care and expand medical students’ training in oral health starting this fall.
Omori’s own interest in medicine began as a child, when asthma attacks led to frequent trips to the emergency room. She outgrew asthma, but her interest in medicine remained. The John A. Burns School of Medicine didn’t have a family medicine clerkship when Omori started school, and her initial plan was to pursue pediatrics. That changed after third- and fourth-year rotations with family physicians Randall Suzuka, M.D., and Jinichi Tokeshi, M.D., respectively.
The rotation with Suzuka was Omori’s first exposure to family medicine.
“I really enjoyed his clinic, seeing all the things that he was doing and the connection that he had with his patients,” she said. “In my fourth year, I rotated with another family physician. Again, I really enjoyed working in that practice, started to become more familiar with what family medicine was, and it really spoke to the kind of doctor I wanted to be.”