Bruce Smith, Jr., MD
Hospitalist and Attending Physician, Department of Medicine,
Cooper University Health Care, Camden, NJ
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, Camden, NJ
1. What is your current professional position?
I am a Hospitalist and an Attending Physician in the Department of Medicine at Cooper University Health Care in Camden, NJ. I’m also an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Cooper Medical School at Rowan University in Camden, NJ.
2. Why did you choose internal medicine?
Coming into medical school I was going to be a surgeon for sure. During third year on clinical rotations, I found myself drifting more toward the patients at the bedside. I was more interested in talking to the person and figuring things out that way. I liked that internal medicine touches on just about everything and anything. The next patient through the door is always experiencing something different, and it keeps things exciting.
3. What trends are you seeing in your day-to-day practice (with patients, the health care system, or otherwise)?
The two big things I have seen in my hospital-based practice in recent years have been overall declines in access to care—mostly in terms of financial access—and general mistrust of the medical field. Everything has become so expensive, and there are never-ending battles with insurance companies to cover medications and services that we often feel are no-brainers.
4. What do you want to accomplish professionally within the next five years?
I came out of residency just a bit too early and missed a lot of the POCUS training. Now, I am trying to learn that sort of on my own while practicing. In the next few years, I hope to be better equipped in POCUS and to contribute to teaching POCUS.
5. Can you share a brief (and anonymous) patient encounter or professional situation that made you proud to be an internal medicine physician?
Believe it or not, the proudest time I have had as an IM physician was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, I was working as a hospitalist in a large hospital system limping out of an awful 2019 influenza wave. Everyone was already beat up from that. Then COVID decides to show up, and now we have this new thing that is proving to be quite problematic and nobody knows what to do about it. Here we are as frontline hospitalists taking on most of these patients, trying to figure out what is best and how to get through this together. Everyone rallied behind hospital medicine and critical care during those times to figure it all out. Patients were grateful; other medical specialties were grateful. Despite how terrible of a time it was in the world, I was excited and proud to be on the front line working to get our lives back.