April 5, 2023
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She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and currently serves as the Assistant Dean for Clinical Curriculum at the UNC School of Medicine, but her journey to the specialty began before medical school at the University of Washington. “I was looking for opportunities to shadow physicians,” Dr. Coe says, “and it was hard to come by that opportunity.”
But then she found a preceptor program through the Washington Academy of Family Physicians (WAFP). Through that program, she met Dr. Jeanne Cawse-Lucas, the family physician who soon taught her about Family Medicine. “I was paired with Dr. Cawse-Lucas,” Dr. Coe says, “who has continued to be a mentor to me throughout my career. Shadowing her was when I fell in love with the specialty. I was amazed by how she had such a breadth of knowledge and could so nimbly serve one patient after another.” (If you’re interested, the NCAFP also has precepting options you can enter as a student or as a mentor.)
Dr. Coe says that involvement with the WAFP also helped her choose Family Medicine. “It was apparent that in every policy meeting, it was the family physicians who cared most about patients and were trying to make their patients’ lives better,” she says. “They weren’t self-involved. They had the patient at the center of what they did.”
These physician examples led Dr. Coe to become a family physician herself, and they gave her a mission: “Secretly, my lifelong mission is to make more family docs, because I love what we do and think there should be more of us.”
In addition to her work at UNC’s Department of Family Medicine, Dr. Coe served as the director of the Fully-Integrated Readiness for Service (FIRST) Program and more recently joined the American Academy of Medical Colleges (AAMC) Board of Directors as a junior faculty representative. It suits the years of work she has already done in student curricular development and leadership. “It’s been an amazing experience,” Dr. Coe says. “The AAMC is really transparent and collaborates with the board to look at many issues and has been focusing on student and resident concerns.”
Dr. Coe says she’s glad to be with the AAMC as it takes actions that’ll help medical students with wellness and the overall cost of medicine. “That’s been something that’s really amazing to facilitate,” she says. “Being junior faculty, I’m more proximate to these specific issues than other members of the board. It’s why I appreciate the real commitment they’ve made to navigating these issues.”
Specifically, Dr. Coe works with the AAMC to enable medical students to move between the different parts of medicine. “We’re looking at ways we can harmonize the continuum of medical education,” she says. “That’s a big passion area of mine with the FIRST program. I hope we see more recommendations that minimize barriers for students transitioning from one part of medicine to another. That’s where we can make a broader impact.”
Dr. Coe enjoys teaching Family Medicine partly because of this versatility. Her early experience in medicine introduced her to many people who admired primary care but felt it wasn’t best for them. Their hesitancy informs her teaching today. “For me, teaching and getting into leadership roles were ways to demonstrate what a family doctor can do. Hopefully, I can help them dispel some myths about the specialty so they can make a difference and care for patients with the skill sets they have in Family Medicine.”