Treating the neighborhood: A family physician serves an underserved community

Michael Malone, DO, cares for residents of two inner-city Chicago areas, inside and outside the exam room.

By Tanya Albert, AMNews staff. April 26, 2004.

More than a decade ago, then-accountant Michael Malone joined the ranks of future doctors who decide to subject themselves to academic rigor followed by exhausting on-the-job training because he wanted to take care of people.

He gave up his accounting job and took the undergraduate sciences courses needed to apply to medical school and then plowed through the MCAT.

After completing osteopathic school and residency, however, he shunned private practice, electing instead to practice someplace he was really needed -- an inner-city neighborhood.

After finishing his residency in a tough neighborhood on Chicago's West Side, Michael Malone, DO, took a job with Access Community Health Network, which operates 42 health centers in underserved Chicago neighborhoods and the suburbs. The network's mission statement: Services are available to all who need them without regard to age, race, ethnicity, gender, language, religion, education, sexual orientation, physical condition or ability to pay.

He was assigned to a clinic on Chicago's South Side where 38% of the residents are living below the poverty level. The Englewood and New City neighborhoods also are home to many working patients who don't have health insurance through their employers.

He's been there almost three years.

"I can't imagine doing it any other way," Dr. Malone said during a lunch break in the small office that he shares with the other physician assigned to the clinic. "I wanted to be where I was needed. Everybody deserves the right to have medical care."