Introducing Lauren Eisenbeis-Thome, Director of Didactic Education

In this episode of The Well, hosts Mary Jackson and Leanne Hedges introduce a new faculty spotlight series featuring Dr. Lauren Eisenbeis-Thome, Director of Didactic Education for the Mount St. Mary’s PA Program, as she shares her unique journey into the PA profession.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Well Podcast. We are Mount St. Mary's PA program, and if you've joined us before, you know that the Well is a source of insight, inspiration, and growth for future PAs. I'm Mary Jackson, the program director. I'm joined today by our associate program director, Leanne Hedges. Hi, everyone, nice to see you again. And today we're starting a series to introduce our faculty. And I'm sure Leanne feels the same way that I do, which is we have the most dynamic faculty, individuals who are so passionate about being PAs, about clinical work, caring for patients, and really making a difference in education. I feel so honored to have this group here working with me. And we all come from different specialty backgrounds, which I think is very special. So today we have as our guest Dr. Lauren Eisenbeis-Tome. And Lauren, do you want to introduce yourself and share a little bit about your journey to being a PA and your clinical practice? Absolutely. Thank you all for having me here today.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

I'm super excited to talk to everyone. So I've been a PA for the past seven years. I went to school in New York City, Wagner College, and had a bit of a different, unique PA school experience. I actually joined PA school right out of high school and did a combined bachelor's and master's program. So not your traditional route that everyone goes down. So my junior year of undergraduate college was actually my didactic year of PA school. And so it was a very unique opportunity. It was pretty accelerated through, and I did two years of clinical rotations in the greater metropolitan area of New York City before graduating. And I ended up landing my first job at Johns Hopkins in Maryland. It was a great first job to have, very exciting. I worked for their plastic and reconstructive surgery department. This was an area I fell in love with as a student. I had the opportunity to rotate at Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan, saw incredible surgeries. I never knew what plastics could entail. I thought it was mostly cosmetics or working in Miami, something along those lines. But instead, we were reconstructing people's faces or reconstructing lower or upper extremities using various parts of the body. And having that opportunity, I knew I wanted any job that would accept me as a new grad in plastics and ended up in Maryland. So I was at Hopkins for a few years. I made a transition to Luminous Health in Annapolis, Maryland, where I was the lead PA. And during that time, I had wonderful opportunities to work on research, to do some publishing with textbooks. And that kind of opened up this whole new world for me on presenting and going to national conferences. And it really honed in on my love for teaching and telling other people about how to, you know, be a PA, what a PA is, and how we can improve our profession. And that's amazing. So from there, I had some colleagues and friends who were starting a PA program in Maryland. They reached out to me asking if I wanted to do some adjunct teaching for them. And I had my first role as an adjunct professor for another program who's this one was not open yet, and taught their surgery course and absolutely fell in love with it. It was so fun to work with students every day, to teach and to be a part of their journey throughout PA school. And I knew that I just want to keep keep on looking for that in different careers. And one day an email popped into my inbox and I saw an opportunity for Mount St. Mary's University. It was a bit of a reach job for me. I didn't think that I had the qualifications to necessarily get this position and got an interview, fell in love with this program, with the mission, the goals, the alignment on wellness and healthcare equity, two things that I personally feel very uh attached to. And here I am, a year later in this Director of Didactic Education role, and could not be happier.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Awesome. Well, I feel like you did such a great job answering even other questions that I had. I love your journey in PA because I think what some PA students may not realize is there's a whole wealth of things that you could do with your PA degree in in conjunction with working clinically or beyond working clinically. And so it's very inspiring. I know I'm excited to learn. What do you look forward to the most with our incoming cohort?

SPEAKER_02 4:50

So, what I am most excited about, and what I've been telling you know others when they ask me what I'm excited about for this program is how much active learning and how much hands-on learning our students are going to receive. I remember in PA school, and I loved my PA school, I felt like it was a lot of lecture-based, and there wasn't a lot of time to interact with one another, interact with patients, to perform skills and procedures. And here our students from week one are going to be in the lab for a minimum of three hours a week throughout the entire semester. But that first semester, they're getting six hours a lab every single week. And we're doing procedures, we are doing ultrasound curriculum, histories and physicals, simulations. I am so excited for the students to have that opportunity so they feel incredibly prepared to go out on clinical rotations.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

I have a question. As we introduced you as Dr. Eisenweiss, can you tell us about your doctorate and how you kind of led down that path? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 5:52

So I, again, the same friends and colleagues who reached out to me to do some teaching, they're wonderful mentors for myself. And they also introduced me to the DMSC, the doctorate of medical science for PAs. And they were telling me a little bit about it and how much it advanced their career. And so I, again, it was one of these things I didn't think I was qualified for, but I took the shot and I applied and got a doctorate in advanced professional practice through the University of Lynchburg. And I learned so much about leadership, quality, what it means to advance your degree as a PA. And ultimately it really opened up a lot of doors for me to get into the realm of a director level in education, to be able to sit on these higher level meetings and have a voice in advocating for PAs. And so it was an invaluable experience. I really enjoyed my time going back to school and very happy that I did it.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

Yeah, I love hearing your story because I know myself, I didn't even know what a PA was until I was halfway through college. But you committed to being a PA at what 18 years old?

SPEAKER_02 7:05

I was 18, yes, when I said I'm gonna go to PA school. And I committed to five years of the whole next journey in my life.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

So how did you get introduced to the PA profession at that early age?

SPEAKER_02 7:16

So we always knew I wanted to be in medicine. I originally thought, I want to go, you know, I'm gonna be a doctor. Didn't really love the necessarily the work-life balance that physicians had. And so during my uh junior year of high school, I started going on some college tours with my my friends and who are also looking at schools. And I happened to go to Wagner College, which is my uh where I went to PA school. And during their big open house, there was a little stop about PAs. I said, What is this little what are these white coats over here? Those kids look kind of cool. So I popped over there. I said, Tell me more about what a PA is. And they were the ones that first introduced me to the profession. I ended up going to that college, and so it was a very full-circled moment for me to learn about it and then graduate from their program.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

That's wonderful. That's incredible. Well, I say this to everyone. You have brought so much to this team. Your ability to handle multiple complex projects, to really understand that what we're doing here is very student-centered. I think that the curriculum, the schedule, they're all so intentional and well thought out by you. The experts that you're bringing in to help us teach and supplement our education are just phenomenal. And I'm really excited for our students to get to experience all of that. But we are very grateful to have you on the team. And I'm excited. I'm sure that some of our students are going to be very interested in surgery and they'll have a wealth of knowledge in you. Before we close, I want to ask what we always ask on the Well Podcast, which is what seed would you like to plant with the next generation of healthcare leaders?

SPEAKER_02 8:58

My seed to plant for all future healthcare leaders is to just say yes and to try something new. There were multiple times where I did not think I had the qualifications, the knowledge, the ability to do something, whether it was writing a textbook chapter, applying for a doctorate, applying for this job. And every time I said, I just am going to say yes and try my best. And it has landed me amazing, incredible opportunities that I never would have done if I had said no. So say yes, go out of your comfort zone and try something new.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

I love that. I think a lot of us need to hear that. And when I when I hear you say things like, I don't think I was qualified, I think you're so highly qualified. You're exactly the person with the experience that we need on this team. So thank you so much for joining us. Um, and we can't wait to meet you back. Thanks for having me.