There aren’t nearly enough Native American physicians. A crash course in medicine seeks to change that

She’d just used a defibrillator to resuscitate a man whose heart had stopped, and now, in the next room, a baby’s head was crowning, the mother emitting a stream of loud, harrowing moans.

“I see a head,” shouted Jordan Owen. “The baby is coming!”

“You need to get the shoulder out,” said emergency physician Valerie Dobiesz, speaking calmly, but loudly over the mother’s agonized howls. “You don’t want her to tear her.”

Owen worked gently to ease out the baby’s rubber shoulder. Rubber, because this was a simulation and the mother and baby were high-tech dummies. It was thrilling but routine work at the medical simulation training center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. But this recent day was anything but routine. In the labor and delivery room, and in two other simulation rooms nearby, every single trainee was Native American.

By Usha Lee McFarling

Kalista White (left), watches as Anpotowin Jensen (center), both students from the Ohiyesa Premedical Program, practice delivering a baby in a childbirth training with emergency physician Valerie Dobiesz (right), at Brigham and Women's Hospital.