Dr. Greg Beilman: Army Medics to Med School

The KC Crew visits with Retired Army Colonel, Trauma Surgeon, Dr. Greg Beilman about a unique University of Minnesota program that capitalizes on the talent and experience of Army Medics and recruiting them for Medical School. The need for physicians in rural Minnesota is quite critical; moreover, this program could help address the need.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Kindness Chronicles, where once again, we hope to inject the world with the dose of the Minnesota Nice. That it desperately needs. Here in the studio we got, uh, what's your name again? Michael Dempsey? Yeah, that's right. Michael Dempsey and Steve Brown. Hi. Kevin Gorg is on assignment. he's at a Minnesota Wild youth hockey function tonight. So he's being nice to children. Good for him. Our last episode about being nice kids, and we should all be nice kids. But, we have a very special guest. this is a gentleman that I happened to meet just last week, but I had heard of him before. I had the good fortune of sitting right next to him at a fancy dinner that we were at at the Ritz Carlton. Oh, good for you! Dang! At the Ritz Carlton in Naples, Florida. Dr. Greg Beelman. from the University of Minnesota. Welcome, sir. How are you today? I'm, uh, awesome, John, and, uh, thank you for that nice introduction. I'll point out that the dinner was at the Ritz Carlton, but The university put me up in a very different hotel. Well, of course. So, it's funny you should bring that up. I was talking to, uh, Kathy Schmidlkofer, who is the head of the foundation. That's not a real name. No, that's her name. She is the president of the University of Minnesota Foundation. We happen to be traveling with her. And I asked her, I said, Oh, sweet. So, are you staying at the Ritz Carlton and she says well no we're a public university and we have a per diem that, uh, the entire weekend would be blown in, uh, you know, and we'd have to share with one room at the Ritz Carlton. Wow. But, uh, we had a lovely dinner there. It was, uh, what they call a mini, medical school Dr. Beelman, if you don't mind, it's Greg Beelman, he said we should call him Greg. But he's also a retired colonel in the U. S. Army. And I mentioned that if I was a doctor and a colonel, I would request that people refer to me as Dr. Colonel Schweitz. Colonel Doctor, yeah. Colonel Doctor. What would it be? Would it be Dr. Colonel or Colonel Doctor? Um, nobody's ever tried to use both of them. Okay. Yeah. One or the other. Go alphabetical order. So go Colonel Doctor. But, but Greg, tell us a little bit about your, your background. We have a young man here, Michael Dempsey, who actually served. in what capacity did you serve, Michael? It's a little bit embarrassing that I'm talking to a colonel and you're asking me in what capacity I served. Um, uh, Greg, I, uh, probably in the mid eighties to get through college, I joined the Minnesota National Guard and, um, had aspirations of also, um, going for my commission as well, but you're a doctor. I had kidney stones and they wouldn't give me a waiver, and so I did six years. So,, in the Minnesota National Guard, but if you're familiar with the National Guard and, uh, the folks there, I, I, I read your bio, a number of deployments, uh, my brother is still in, and he may have been on one of those deployments with you, you know, it's a big community and a small community. Right. He's a command sergeant major, your brother, right? Yeah, he is. He is. Wow. He's currently command sergeant major, um, um, of the, uh, of the Blackhawk battalion out of St. Paul. Um, yeah, yeah. So, uh, yeah, yeah. But I'm, I'm curious, Greg, uh, to, to go back to John's question. Where'd you grow up and how did the military enter in? So Mike, I grew up a family, a family of six in Wichita, Kansas. Um, my family, uh, the family business was Boeing, uh, as you might anticipate, in Wichita. Uh, and my family was from, uh, eastern Colorado and western Kansas, Hayes, Kansas and, um, Weld County, Colorado. And so I spent a lot of time both in western Kansas and Colorado with my cousins and playing on the farm. Right, right. I went to medical school at the University of Kansas and then was lucky enough to match as a surgery resident in Wichita. Um, and what I picked up on very quickly was that the best surgeons of the generation ahead of me were the gentlemen that had been sent to Um, Vietnam at that time. I spent time in Vietnam. And I, my, my father's generation all served. Sure. Um, and I had the opportunity to join the Army Reserves in Wichita and, um, and I said you know, if, uh, we're ever in another war, I'd like to be taking care of kids and not watching them come back on TV. Wow. joined, joined the reserves in 1991 and, um, my life changing event was getting sent to Kosovo in 2000, just before 9 11. And, uh, uh, at that point I was living in Minnesota doing a critical care, uh, starting my surgery career at the University of Minnesota. And I said, Oh my gosh, this is, uh, this is everything. I'm making a difference for people. Uh, it's an amazing experience having the chance to make these decisions in the moment and make a difference for these kids. Is it just me or does his voice sound like a colonel? You got great pipes, colonel, colonel doctor. Yeah, I would, I would, I would agree with you. He sounds like a colonel. He sounds like a bird. He sounds like a bird for sure. So Greg, the thing that I was most intrigued with is how you have taken your experience in the military and have applied it to the way that we might be treating people specifically in rural areas. I don't want to just jump right into that, but that, that to me is the most fascinating, part of your story, at least that part that I heard the night that we, uh, that we were with each other. Can you explain a little bit about what your, your thoughts are on that? I can, John, and thanks for the opportunity to talk about it. Um, I took this new job with, the, medical school and with, uh, Jacob Toller, who's the dean of the medical school. about three years ago, and Jacob was interested in using my military experience, and I've been funded by the DoD for trauma research for almost, uh, 25 years now. but he said, we want you to figure out how to apply that experience, both to bring in more grants for the medical school, uh, but also for making a difference to the people in Minnesota, which honestly is a rural state. Even though we don't think about that in the Twin Cities, 40 percent of our patients in Minnesota. Live more than an hour from a level one or level two trauma. Oh, wow. The trauma center you need to go to if you've been severely injured. Um, and so there's huge opportunities for us to, uh, understand and then help. Make a difference for people who are, doing their jobs all over the rest of the state besides Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Cloud, and Rochester. And as I said, that's a lot of people. doctors in Minneapolis. I don't understand the trials and tribulations of people trying to deliver medical care in smaller communities and in the more rural communities. And, uh, there's not the resources available. There's not the specialists available. There's not the pharmacy services or the 24 hour services that we get used to. And so, helping to make sure that patients in those settings have access to care. I think it's critical for improving the care of people in the state of Minnesota. And one of the things that you brought up that I just found very fascinating is that, military medics that are out in the field are in many respects similar to rural doctors in the sense that if you don't have a level one trauma center, Your objective really is to stabilize the patient and get them and, you know, when you mentioned that 40 percent of the people in the state of Minnesota live at least an hour away from a level one trauma center, how can the medics in the army translate into serving that rural population? So I'm going to use special forces medics as an example. Um, before I get there, I'll just say that a medic, uh, in the Army at 68 Whiskey, uh, would do about 11 weeks of training at Fort Sam Houston, uh, before being deployed as a medic, usually to a medical treatment facility somewhere. Um, the special ops medics do quite a bit more extensive, um, training. It's almost a year and a half of training after basic training. That includes a lot of hands on training. With, um, uh, simulation with animal models and with people. And the reason that's important is because these special ops teams go to difficult places and are out there by themselves. Uh, and the medics are serving the medical needs of these small teams of. Well, 14 individuals and and so they. Frequently will be put in a situation where they're having to make decisions on the fly. about how to best take care of a problem that's come up with somebody. That situation in the, in the special ops medic translates to somebody who is confident, who has had, uh, life experiences that don't equate to what I had when I was a medical student, for instance. Um, and I, Um, think equates to somebody that would make a great physician in a lot of situations. Well, and, and where do those medics end up? I mean, what profession, I mean, do they, do they not stay in the medical profession? Um, I think a lot of them are looking for opportunities to stay in the medical profession and step up, um, as a whole specialty of physician's assistance. Uh, for instance, came out of special ops medics. Really back in Vietnam in the 60s and early 70s, who had no place to go after doing all the work that they were doing in Vietnam, and they became physician's assistants. Um, I had the experience, um, about two years ago of spending. Several weeks in Ukraine with a retired special ops medics. And what got me excited about other opportunities that we could create, which I think we're going to get to was listening to this young man, talk about what he was trying to do after leaving the army, leaving the special ops medics community. And his, uh, trials and tribulations to try to get into medical school. And you would think that with all that practical experience, that medical schools would be in a lather trying to get those people to become part of their program. what's the problem? What's the hang up? What's the challenge? Um, so medical school is both a practical experience, you know, you're learning a trade, but also you have to learn an incredible amount of of basic science knowledge and skills to be able to take care of patients. It's estimated that you learn 20, 000 new words going through your first two years of medical school. And it takes about a thousand words to be able to get by in a language. So that's 20 new languages that maybe you don't speak very well. But as a doctor, you're speaking one very intensive language. Um, and so these kids also have to have the ability to be able to absorb that. I will say that many of these young men and women come from a background and experience where they've just not had the opportunities that I had in college to, um, demonstrate achievement, uh, but they demonstrate it as they go through their military career and other ways. we're looking for medics who have that ability, have that experience. That I can then talk into going to medical school at the University of Minnesota. So are you actively pursuing those people at the University of Minnesota? We are. We, thanks to Dean Tolar and his support, uh, three years ago, we spent two years putting together a pathway program for medics, uh, to get them into medical school. Uh, last year we had our first recruiting year. We looked at about 80 people. Uh, we, uh, coned in on about 15 or 20 people that have both the experience and, uh, the background that made them competitive. And I was very excited this last year. We enrolled three people in this medic, the medical school program. program is a one to two year program. That is tailored to the needs of the individual. Every I like to say, everybody is a special person with different backgrounds. Some people need more class for more. Some people need more experience touching patients for observing the touching the face. Some people need help studying for the, the entrance exam for board. And so for each of these individuals, we put together. A one to two year plan of how are you going to go from where you are now to being a excellent candidate for medical school. And I'm happy to call out the fact that we enrolled three people last fall. Um, two of those three people are going to be entering medical school this next fall. The second person is doing two years with us before she enters medical school the fall after. So these people come there with, amazing, uh, Abilities. They have to be have. They have to quickly assess situations right in the field. They have to be communication experts, logistic experts and transportation experts, right? They have to think all those things all the while, you know, human lives are on the line, right? Correct. But they better be good at uh, P Chem and O Chem and all those other things. Yeah. They come fully formed with uh, problem solving that now they just have to cross over in and continue the rest of the medical aspect of it, right? that's very well put. What I'm looking for is kids that have the maturity and operational experience, um, and then some of the background in. The science that you're talking about. And then honestly, most of these kids have a significant background in science as well. other thing that's important for us is, uh, gosh, I don't have to tell you that the army is different than the civilian life, and, and so we spend a lot of time with these kids, uh, talking to them and identifying people who could mentor them about the transition from, um, saluting and saying, yes, ma'am. Uh, to what it's like to be a doctor and how to work within the medical system on the civilian side. there's a difference between Operating, on an army base and in the civilian world, I actually work a little bit with veteran entrepreneurs that are trying to launch businesses and, the same translation work needs to happen. Right? You're using different words, but what I'm curious about, since this is the kindness chronicles, um, I can attest that when you're sick, when you're really in a bad way, Um, you're so vulnerable and your experiences with nurses and doctors. The kindness that they show, the calm, the kindness can make all the difference because you're just laying there. You're in a, you're in a really, really bad situation. And I'm wondering when you're, training in the army, being a guy that went through basic training at Fort Jackson in the middle of the summer, right? I, I, kindness isn't one of the things in the hip pocket training and the no one's teaching kindness. How do you take that on? Where does bedside manner come in? Because I don't remember that particular course on the gun range. the turn your head and cough, right? Yeah. Right, right, right, right. Um, but thank you for bringing that up. And for me specifically, I love what I do and I, I am a doctor first and you know, I'm an administrator, bean counter, if you want to call me that as well. And my other job. But I still see patients every day. Yeah. I still, you know, I've had the clinic today where I saw five, uh, new patients. And I love that part of my job where I can interact on a daily basis with people and make that difference one person by one person. Um, as a military leader, I was always told, Boy, you're so nice. And then I come back from a six month deployment. And my partners back here in Minnesota would say, why are you such an asshole? Oh, boy. I can see that. Yeah, right. So I had trouble, um, uh, balancing, I think, the two sides of that. Yeah. But at the end of the day, if you're a doctor, nurse, respiratory therapist, pharmacist, our mission, and what I talked about, our mission is to make sure we're taking care of that patient. And so the military is very mission driven. organization. My job is to return every sailor, soldier, airman, and Marine, uh, to their home, to their family, to give them the best life after their injury that I can give them. And that's the mission that everybody during every one of my deployments got behind. Yeah. And so whether, you know, and granted, I'm a different guy when I'm Colonel Dielman. And when I'm Dr. Bielman here at the University of Minnesota, but, but again, everybody can get behind and my experience with the docs, nurses and others. During deployments is they're focused on that mission. Well, we noticed that, uh, your medical school slogan was be kind, pursue excellence and make a difference. So be kind, we noticed be kind was the first on that slogan list. That's right. That's right. How does that relate to your, medical school there? The way I have absorbed that first bullet point, uh, in that message. Uh, but we are all here to do a job. We're all here, everybody comes to work every day wanting to make a difference in what they do. Uh, and you have to assume that most people have good intent. They don't come to work wanting to irritate you. Wanting to tell, you know, um, and you know, early in my career, I thought that everybody that disagreed with me, that was what they were trying to do. But you know, what I do now is say, I want to understand what you're telling me. I want to understand how that works. You get a better product when you listen to people, when you interact in a way that Recognizes the contributions of each of the colleagues that's doing the work. I think that's interesting you mention that because John, did a podcast. I wasn't on this one a couple of weeks ago you almost quoted John, which is you have to listen. And I don't, I don't know if you remember that, John, but you were very specific about, you have to listen. My favorite saying is it's more important to be interested than interesting. Yeah. that's one way to go about it. Especially, I guess, if you're a doctor, you want to understand what's going on, what the issue is. early in my career, I will say that as a surgeon, I knew all the answers. Just ask me. Sure. What I started to figure out in my leadership journey, Is I wasn't as smart as I thought I was that I knew a piece of the problem, but it was really important to engage my nurses, my pharmacist, my respiratory therapist, my administrators in putting together and talking about issues and figuring out how to solve them, not just them listening to me download what I thought was the right answer. it really helped me as a leader. 15 years ago when I figured that out the hard way. So are you a general surgeon or do you have a surgery specialty that you engage in? The short, how about yes to both of those things? Yes. Perfect. I'm a general surgeon. I came to Minnesota to train as an intensivist and a trauma surgeon. Um, I've practiced critical care for 25 years of my career and trauma surgeon for about the same length. Um, over the last 15, 20 years, I've become a lot more expert on the pancreas, and I don't want to get into how that happened. But I spend a lot of time taking care of people with chronic pancreatitis and thinking about surgical ways to treat, to treat many of those patients. Okay, um, when you're not doctor and you're not colonel Where do you like to eat in town? How about that? Where do you, what do you like to eat? I, I, I like to eat at home with my wife. No, she's not listening, Greg. Geez. And, and then honestly, I like the. Um, some place where I don't have to wear a jacket or a tie and I like to be with people that I like. And, and so the food is less critical than being with the folks that I enjoy hanging out. It sounds like you've had a lot of MREs, so the uh, so the bar is pretty low. That's what it sounds like. I've had a lot of MREs, and military cooking in the bar is pretty darn hard. Yeah, right. That's right. Well, and I can tell you that, uh, the member of our cast who's not here, Kevin Gorg, had you mentioned that he would have easily disqualified you as a, uh, as a member of the Kindness Chronicles crew, because food is very important to that. That's right. That's right. How about, uh, Doctor Craig, what do you do in your downtime? Do you are you a movie guy? Are you a musician by any chance you play guitar anything like that? I? Started out as a musician. I played viola and I'm lucky enough to be associated with a younger brother who just recently retired as a violinist with the New Zealand String Quartet Here's a professional cellist with the North Carolina company. And so I'm the black sheep of the family because do you guys ever play together? I mean, like at family reunions, do, seriously, do you get it together and. Trying to make music? We do, and I am the weak link of that organization. You know what though, if one of them loses their arm in a, uh, in a, in a farming accident. I do have a sincere question about, rural medicine. You hear about these stories of people losing limbs. Right, farm accidents. You know, farm accidents, stuff like that. there was that John Thompson back in the day who lost both of his arms. Right. And 911 using a pencil in his mouth. Yeah. Oh man. Do you still do those kind of surgeries? I mean, do you see that stuff? I see that stuff, but uh, on the civilian side, fortunately I have younger partners now who heat that stuff up. And so I've Um, I have, uh, unfortunately given up that part of my, my last question is this, and then we'll let you get back to, uh, to dinner with your wife, of course. Yeah, right. Um, I was at a, function with President Cunningham, there goes my name drop for the day, on Friday morning, and Tim Pawlenty, the governor was there, the, the former governor, and he mentioned that back in the mid 70s, the University of Minnesota graduated about 270 medical students. And do you know how many they graduated this past year? According to Polenti, the number of docs that were graduating have not kept up even close to the number of people that are needing to be served by docs. And I'm just wondering, what can be done to improve that ratio? Um, the first thing that can be done is you can write your congressman and ask them to increase the amount of Medicare support. resident training positions. Okay. Right now, uh, there is a fixed number of resident, uh, training programs supported through Medicare, uh, that was fixed back in the days of, uh, this guy that many people probably don't even remember Bill Clinton. Oh my God. Not been increased since that. Holy cow. Yeah, that's amazing. It's hard to train more. medical students when there's no positions to put them into when they finish as residents. so having the support to pay for these residents in these programs is critical to growing the number of medical students. I will say that there are a number of, uh, increased medical school numbers, uh, across the country. Many of them for profit that have now Increase the competitiveness of these residency programs. So that's that's 1 pushback that I would make with regards to the number of. Medical school slots is you got to be able to put them into a training program. Absolutely. After they finish medical school. And the fact that it hasn't, the number, the, the, the support hasn't improved in 30 years. Isn't that crazy? Isn't that crazy? Isn't that crazy? Hey, thank you for the, because I'm going to ask a doctor question. Thanks for the military service, and a colonel's no joke. You did it. Um, lots of deployments and a huge commitment, and it's wonderful to hear the work that you're doing at the University of Minnesota. But my question is, you talked about a program, a few minutes ago where you were taking, military doctors and bring them in the program. Is that program unique to the University of Minnesota? And if so, are you, sharing it with, with other organizations, with other universities? we took the. Program that they run at the uniformed services university, which is the Medical school for the military. Yeah in washington dc they have A similar program, that program though requires an eight year commitment, uh, of service afterwards. So, he said there might be a few people that are, are not able to make that type of an eight year commitment on top of what they've got. Sure, sure. Um, So there are, as far as I know, there's a USU program, us, and then West Virginia that had a program for about five years. Yeah, good on you. Hopefully you have success and, you can propagate it. At least lead, you know, other, other big medical universities to do, but thank you for, doing that. That's thinking outside the box. Not bad. Well, uh, for that. And if you are interested in learning more about our program or the work we're doing, uh, our website is traumacare. umn. edu. They feel, excuse the advertisement on our, no, that's good. Advertise away and you know, in the land of philanthropy, if we're not getting the money through Medicare. let's try and extract some money from some individuals to help support that. We'll make sure the website's posted on our link for this, too. So people can check that out and, uh, I don't know how to do that. Do you know how to do that? Yeah. Okay, good. I'm our media manager. That's right. We have a media manager. That's good. That's good, because none of us can do it. Oh, we can do it. All right. Well, Dr. Colonel Bean Counter Greg Beelman, thank you for joining the Kindness Chronicles, and, uh, thank you for all you're doing for the state of Minnesota. We sincerely appreciate it. thank you for the chance to speak today, and uh, I appreciate the chance to talk with you both. Thank you very much. Thank you. Alright, bye bye. Bye bye now. With that, off we go. Oxytocin