Don Bloch Award for Contribution to Collaborative Family Healthcare
Award Recipients:
William J. Doherty, PhD and Macaran A. Baird, MD, MS.
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| Bill Doherty |
Thirty years ago, family medicine was still emerging as a field in its own right, and it was during this time that professionals representing fields across the mind/body divide were only beginning to appreciate each other's respective contributions.
In 1979, Bill Doherty was on the faculty of the Family Studies Department at the University of Iowa. One night, he and his wife attended a party for new members at the University, where he met and enjoyed talking with two new faculty in the department of family medicine. They discovered that there were people like Bill in the world: combining research on family functioning with clinical skills in family therapy. They invited Bill to give a presentation to second year medical students; he didn't know it was an audition. The next thing Bill knew, the department came up with a job description so fitting to his background that it could have said, "Only Bill Doherty need apply." He knew nothing about medical care beyond being married to a nurse, but ignorance has never been an obstacle for Bill in his career.
A year later, Bill was attending a reception at an AAMFT conference and met Mac Baird. Both saw the other as a passionate visionary with a deeply humane and caring persona - and a collaborative partnership now almost 3-decades strong began.
Working together to connect the big pictures of health care as complex and hierarchal systems with the small pictures of patients' and families' individual and unique journeys, Bill and Mac's extensive contributions to the field of family medicine and collaborative care was brought to scale in 1983 when they published the first book ever regarding the relevance of family systems theory to primary care. This set into motion a revolution that would inspire an entire generation of students and providers across the helping professions.
Bill then went on to co-launch (with Susan McDaniel and Jeri Hepworth) the specialty of
"medical family therapy" with a book by the same name in 1992, wherein he and his colleagues introduced a biopsychosocial approach to working with and empowering families with health problems while at the same time teaching providers new ways of working together. Bill's work from there has gone on to bridge democratic public theory and community organizing strategies (Citizen Health Care) into the arenas of behavioral health and biomedicine along with Tai Mendenhall and Jerica Berge.
Across his professional journey, Bill has always honored those who have influenced his thinking and inspired him to challenge and change the ways that health care is conducted. Don Bloch has been a powerful influence on how to create an organization and a movement. McDaniel and Hepworth have pushed Bill's philosophies about how family therapists can work with medical problems and collaborate deeply with medical providers. Harry Boyte, a political theorist and community organizer, has been Bill's primary mentor in creating Citizen Health Care. And across the innumerable projects, initiatives, and passionate undertakings that he has led or been a part of, Bill has always learned - and continues to learn - from the everyday citizens (patients, families) who offer lived-experience and wisdom regarding health and wellness that could never be wholly tapped or understood from a textbook. And through these and many other forces, alongside his driven and passionate personality that will never settle for the status quo, Bill's headlong efforts in all that he does are far from over. He's just warming up.
Macaran Baird
To know Macaran Baird is to know the meaning of family. The roots of his professional passion, his courage, his focus, what he gets up for every day, are an extension of his family experience. Mac grew up with an older sister who suffered from schizophrenia and he experienced the turmoil and fear that this disease brings to families. He absorbed the courage of his parents in caring for his sister and coping with misplaced blame directed toward his mother for being schizophrenogenic. His parents taught Mac to look at the world through the eyes of the underdog and this perspective has influenced his entire career.
In college Mac shared his desire to become a physician with a chaplain. "I want to be a doctor that talks to people," he said. "Doctors don't do that," replied the chaplain. So Mac pursued a master's degree in environmental health with a focus on the impact of air pollution on health. His professor suggested he would never be paid for this work. After completing his degree, he began his medical education in 1971. In both of these educational settings he was exposed to the demeaning process that often plagues graduate education. This angered him and fuels the approach he takes as a teacher and mentor.
Mac's third year of medical school was spent on a rural rotation where he was frustrated to not have answers to many of the questions that families brought to him. Mac wondered if he was "slow.". Upon entering residency training in 1975 he sought supervision from a counselor and psychiatrist in his program. He learned that he did not need the answers; his job was to help his patients find their own ways. He was becoming a family physician and therefore he should be able to help families. In practice he saw families in the waiting room, after hours. A few years after residency graduation he pursued a master's degree in family practice, community health and counseling.
His passion for family work brought Mac to attend conferences and teach others. At one such conference on family work in Iowa - he was the only physician at the meeting - Mac overheard a psychologist talking about working with physicians. Thus began his relationship with Bill Doherty, embarking on a collaboration that is closing in on 30 years. At an AAMFT meeting, Alan Gurman, PhD, enconouraged Mac and Bill to write a book. After 18 months, using time during practice and in the evening to dictate, he and Bill completed Family Medicine and Family Therapy.
Over the next quarter century Mac continued to write, teach, see patients and help others grow. To this day, wherever he goes, Mac helps establish collaborative practices. There is one goal that Mac is proud to not have accomplished. In 1995 he was invited to the Wingspread Conference Center to help start a new organization. He went convinced that it would not work and he was going to let folks know. He failed. The Collaborative Family Healthcare Coalition was launched.
Mac is grateful to many people who have worked with him and helped him grow, beginning with his family and including his medical school mentor, Dr. Jack Verby, his residency counselor, Gus Nelson his residency counselor, Carl Whitaker, MD, David Keith, MD, Don Bloch, MD, Duke Stanton, MD, and Judith Landau Stanton, MD, Michael Glen, MD, and C. J. Peek, PhD, and many others.
Today we honor Mac for his simple, persistent, pervasive and profound contributions in supporting one family, one community and one collaborative practice at a time. For Mac, it has been about holding on to simple core values: treat people with respect and help them grow.; Hhumanize medical education and health care. He shares with us the wisdom he received from the family therapist, Edwin Freidman. "Sometimes it is the whole generation's task to pass on the flickering flame of idealism to the next generation. And that can be all that your generation does." Mac, thank you for your enormous contributions in transforming the flickering flame of collaborative family health care into a torch.
The Levels of Contribution from Drs. Doherty and Baird
The progressive, multi-layered contributions of Bill Doherty, PhD and Mac Baird, MD, MS., might be best appreciated by viewing them as levels of contribution... probably five of them (smile). The levels are:
1. Commitment to collaborative teaching
2. Commitment to collaborative scholarship
3. Modeling the healing of the mind-body split
4. Instilling courage, creativity and innovation in the masses
5. Being critical components of a new discipline
Level 1: Commitment to collaborative teaching
Soon after they met, Mac and Bill recognized in one another a passion, desire and need for a partner to complement each of their interests. Mac saw Bill as man who could understand interactions and people unparalleled in its brilliance. He was a coach for Mac, helping him move beyond his humility to become an articulate teacher. In Mac, Bill saw a passionate visionary who was (and still is) a deeply humane and caring person. Mac could at once see the big picture of the health care system and the small picture of the struggling patient. In one another they enjoyed a willingness to explore, to learn and to share their ideas through a commitment to teach.
Level 2: Commitment to collaborative scholarship
Mac and Bill moved to this phase by publishing the seminal volume, Family Medicine and Family Therapy. The decision to write about ideas represents a commitment to refine and evolve one's thinking. When writing is balanced by testing ideas on audiences, feedback serves as a source of confirmation and at times as a sobering message that more work is needed. One source of feedback that jolted Mac and Bill was hearing that their ideas needed more differentiation to be useful to learners at different developmental levels. This resulted in a paper describing, eh hem, Developmental Levels of Family Centered Care.
Level 3: Modeling the healing of the mind-body split
Add to the teaching and the writing, clinical practice. Here, Mac and Bill experimented with their thinking to become the embodiment of the dissolution of Cartesian and individualistic approaches to clinical problem solving. They combined family medicine and family therapy in patient care, publishing a second book, Family Centered Medical Care: A Clinical Casebook. Once a collaborative duo reaches level 3, their perspectives, contributions, and even their identities blur in the eyes of the audience. They are introduced as one another. Readers try to guess who wrote particular book chapters. Some even attempt to test the bond of their relationship by inviting only one but not the other to teach. Mac and Bill became an amalgamation of thought, theory and practice and their names became a single unit - Doherty and Baird.
Level 4: Instilling courage, creativity and innovation in health care
For only a small proportion of writers, teachers and clinicians does a prolonged effort result in others picking up the torch. These role models stimulate the courage to innovate, experiment, and create. Mac and Bill stimulated educational and community practitioners to develop new styles of teaching and patient care. At level 4, Mac and Bill became generative in their contributions. As a unit, they represented new functioning in the clinical arena and in the educational setting.
Level 5: Becoming critical components of a new discipline
When enough people gather around an idea and share enthusiasm to spread the idea, a movement forms, leading to the creation of a new field: Collaborative Family Health Care. Bill and Mac are not the only people who helped create this field; however, their prolonged commitment to teaching, writing, practice and encouraging others to experiment reached a critical mass. A combination of training programs, scholars, researchers, and policy advocates convened to define a new, interdisciplinary health care domain. Both Mac and Bill served as founding Board members of the Collaborative Family Health Care Coalition, the predecessor to our present-day Association. They both served as founding members of the Editorial Board of Family Systems Medicine, the predecessor to Families, Systems and Health, the CFHA companion journal.
Therefore, for prolonged, creative and inspiring contributions as individuals and as a team, the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association recognizes William J. Doherty, PhD and Macaran A. Baird, MD, MS as the 2008 recipients of the Donald A. Bloch Award for significant contributions to the field of Collaborative Family Healthcare.
Prepared with respect and gratitude by,
Larry Mauksch, M.Ed. & Tai Mendenhall, Ph.D., LMFT
Presented at the Collaborative Family Healthcare Association 10th Annual Conference -- November 8, 2008 in Denver, Colorado