IL DPM Becomes First Chief of Surgery at Local
Hospital
DR. MICHAEL WESSELS has been elected the
Surgical Division Chair at
Katherine Shaw Hospital in Dixon, Illinois.
Wessels is the first
podiatrist to hold the designation at KSB and
will serve until
January 2008.
The road to being designated chief of surgery at
any hospital is
often a long and circuitous one. When Wessels
began practice in
1977, podiatrists were often granted allied
health professional
status at hospitals, if they were granted any
privileges at all.
Even today, it is not difficult to find
hospitals that only grant
podiatrists this quasi-professional status.
Since allied health
professionals were not actually considered
medical staff, they were
not allowed to vote on medical staff concerns.
Wessels worked to get
a by-laws change to allow podiatrists to be
members of the medical
staff at various hospitals with which he was
affiliated in
Northwestern Illinois. While podiatrists
were then admitted to
medical staffs at these hospitals, they were
still not allowed to
vote.
Wessels successfully changed the by-laws to
allow podiatrist voting
privileges, but holding an office on the medical
staff was still not
allowed. Wessels volunteered to serve on various
hospital
committees, beginning with the Performance
Improvement Committee,
which he has chaired for the past 6 years, and
the Physician
Performance Review Committee. Service on
hospital committees led
Wessels to lobby to change the by-laws to allow
podiatrists to serve
as an officer of the medical staff. He argued
that all other
specialties could aspire to hold an office, so
podiatric medicine
should not be excluded. When an opening for a
Member-at-Large on
the Executive Committee came available, Wessels
ran for the office,
and was unanimously elected. After serving two
years as Member-at-
Large, Wessels was slated by the nominating
committee for the Chief
of Surgery position.
Wessels says," It is all about inclusion. To be
respected as an
equal partner in the healing arts we must have
full inclusion on
hospital medical staffs. Each generation of
podiatrists must help
pave the road for the next generation until the
day will come when
the hills my generation had to climb will just
appear to have been
distant bumps along the road to the next
practitioners."
