Learning to Fly: Public Health, Emergency Medicine and the U.S. Navy
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine M.D./M.P.H. student Rebecca Soistmann hopes to move from medical school to U.S. Navy emergency medicine.
When Rebecca Soistmann was a global public health student at the University of Virginia, she realized that health and medicine involve far more than science alone.
“To be competent physicians and socially minded, it’s important to understand the social and economic context our patients are coming from,” said the fourth-year M.D./M.P.H. student at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “I’m systems-minded and want to target root causes, and a lot of that is structural and economic.”
After the Yorktown, Virginia native graduated in 2019, she wanted to be certain that medicine was the right path before committing to medical school. She took a job with Advisory Board, a Washington, D.C.–based health care consulting firm and think tank, where she worked on international health care strategy. Eventually, she joined the firm’s COVID-19 SWAT team, helping global leaders navigate operational challenges during the pandemic. During that time, Soistmann also earned her EMT certification.
“I was involved in direct patient care,” she said. “And all of that brought me to disaster management, which I plan to pursue in my career.”
Ultimately, she hopes to go into emergency medicine.
Soistmann first learned about the Health Professions Scholarship Program, a military program that provides financial assistance for students pursuing health-related degrees in exchange for a service commitment, on a date with a medical student.
“The romance didn’t work out,” she recalled, “but I was intrigued by the possibility of a military scholarship.”
She contacted a U.S. Navy recruiter and began the application process.
“I spoke with lots of folks who had gone through the program—physicians and residents,” she said. “I thought it would be a good way to learn disaster medicine and management in a way I wouldn’t in a civilian space.”
The scholarship covers tuition, fees and a monthly stipend. In return, the Navy requires four years of active-duty service as a full physician.
An Opportunity and an Honor
Soistmann has been selected for an emergency medicine residency at the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth. She will participate in their “pilot program,” a three-year operational tour, after an intern year and hopes to be selected as a flight surgeon and learn how to fly Navy planes while studying aerospace medicine at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola. After that, she will be a doctor for Navy pilots for two and one-half years before returning to Portsmouth to complete her residency.
“I’d be in charge of their health,” she said. “I’d be responsible for grounding them if they had a medical condition that would prevent them from flying, which is why I’d have to learn how to fly.”
Soistmann considers the opportunity valuable as an aspiring physician and a citizen.
“The pilot program gives you operational experience early in your career,” she said. “It feels very patriotic. It’s a big honor. These are folks who are literally putting their lives on the line.”
After her training and active-duty service, it’s standard to complete at least one tour outside the continental U.S.
“So I’d be, who knows, in Okinawa or Sicily, or I could be on faculty at a Naval center as an E.R. doctor,” Soistmann said. “There are many roles the Navy has for emergency physicians.”
This past summer in Portsmouth, Soistmann got some of the hands-on disaster management training she had been seeking. During tactical combat casualty care training at a paintball range, she said, “all the faculty were shooting at different teams of residents and students as we tried to render care to dummies and get them into helicopters.”
It was the kind of experience she couldn’t get in a civilian setting.
“It was a very cool way to see what Navy medicine could be,” she said.
Tags: Department of Medical Education, medical education, medical students, military match, residency