A Night at the Railroad Museum Recognizes the Best of SSVMS
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR'S MESSAGE
One of our great joys at SSVMS is recognizing our physician members who have made extraordinary contributions to our community. At our annual Honors Medicine gala on April 29, we were proud to award the Golden Stethoscope to Kent Jolly, MD, and the Medical Honor Award to Ronald G. Chambers, MD.
Candidates for the Golden Stethoscope Award have been SSVMS members for at least 15 years and show an exemplary devotion to patient care and the medical needs of the community. Recipients of the Medical Honor Award have led a career that has set high standards for practice and the care of individual patients in an environment of unselfishness, compassion and empathy. Dr. Jolly certainly meets those high standards.
“Dr. Jolly is a very generous and capable physician colleague who is always available at any time of the day for an expert opinion on the management of a case,” said his colleague, Dr. Christina Lettieri, who nominated him for the Golden Stethoscope. “His work ethic is unmatched to the care for his patient population. He thinks outside of the box to get the best treatment options for his patients.”
A graduate of the UCSF School of Medicine, he did his pediatrics training at UC Davis and completed a research fellowship in pediatric hematology and oncology at St. Jude’s Research Hospital in Memphis. He returned to Sacramento in 1993 and currently practices at The Permanent Medical Group, where he works with a team of specialists focused on the care of children with cancer or blood disorders.
His time and generosity goes well beyond treating children with diseases they should never have to face. He is a fundraiser for Okizu, a regional camp that provides support to children with cancer, their siblings and parents. Dr. Jolly also serves on the Okizu Foundation board and volunteers at the camp’s infirmary.
Dr. Chambers, our Medical Honor Award recipient, meets the high standard of making a contribution of great significance to our region. In 2016, he launched the Medical Safe Haven Program at Dignity Health to provide trauma-informed health searches to victims of human trafficking in the Sacramento area. Dr. Chambers recognized that by establishing the Medical Safe Haven Program, resident physicians would not only learn about human trafficking and trauma-informed care, but also upon graduation they could take this knowledge with them to other practices around the country.
He currently serves as medical director for the Safe Haven program and educates physicians about the unique health and psychological challenges faced by victims of human trafficking. Substance abuse and psychiatric comorbidities are common, and they are treated by multidisciplinary teams that integrate medical, behavioral health and community resources. In his acceptance speech, Dr. Chambers made a passionate plea to the physicians and medical students in the audience for their assistance in identifying and treating the surprising number of people in California who have been caught in the web of trafficking operations.
Since its inception, the Medical Safe Haven Program at Dignity Health Methodist Hospital has seen over 3,000 patient visits for victims and survivors of human trafficking. The program has been replicated in Redding, Northridge and Santa Maria, where clinics are seeing large volumes of trafficking patients, and will expand to other areas of the state.
Dr. Jolly and Dr. Chambers are just two of the remarkable physicians who make up our membership, and I want to use this opportunity to remember one who can only be described as legendary. We lost Dr. Henry Go, who practiced medicine for over 60 years in Courtland and continued to see patients into his late 80s, on March 16 at the age of 89.
Dr. Go was a family physician in the truest sense. He served generations of patients and was as much a fixture in the Delta as the river itself. A Delta native whose father died when he was just four, he grew up among the pear farms and eventually partnered with Raymond Primasing, MD, another longtime area physician who had been the attending doctor at Henry’s birth. Dr. Go took over the practice in the 1970s and maintained an office on Primasing Road for nearly half a century. On behalf of SSVMS, I want to send our condolences to his wife, Dr. Barbara Arnold (she serves as our District XI delegate to the AMA), to his children and to the thousands of patients who knew Dr. Go as their physician and friend.
