Page 26 - BusinessWest 2023 Healthcare Heroes

HEALTHCARE HEROES OF WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS
of time in this space, his true office, if you will, has always been the ER, and especially the one at Mercy. He arrived there in 2003 and became chief of Emergency Medicine in late 2019, three months before COVID hit and turned the healthcare system, and especially the ER, on its ear.
The trajectory for this career course
was set over time, and Kenton believes his passion for helping others began when he watched medical dramas on television with his mother and became captivated with what he saw.
“My mother had cancer as a child; she spent a lot of time in hospitals and always had a fascination with healthcare,” he recalled. “She was always reading medical books, and we watched every show you can think of — Quincy; Trapper John, M.D.; St. Elsewhere; you name it.”
Because of his love for baseball, Kenton initially considered a career as an athletic trainer, since he could combine both his passions, baseball and healthcare, and he attended Springfield College with that goal in mind.
He quickly realized that the life of
an athletic trainer did not have a lot of stability. And after working as an EMT, a rewarding but also harrowing experience
— “I remember going to shootings and the shooter was still on the loose” — he decided
the emergency room was where he wanted to spend his career. He earned his medical degree at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, with the goal of completing his residency in Baystate Medical Center’s ER, a path that became reality.
As he talked about working in the ER, Kenton related what he told his students when he served as medical director of the Physician Assistant Program at Springfield College. “I would always say, ‘be a little scared every day when you walk in — never lose that. Have a little fear when you walk in, because you don’t know everything, nor should you know everything. You need to know what your resources are and how to utilize those resources. You also need to know that you’re going to be tested — every day.’”
Safe at Home
These days, most of Kenton’s work is administrative in nature — he does one clinical shift per week — and, summing it up, he said it’s about making this ER as safe, welcoming, efficient, and effective as he can.
It needs to be all of the above because the ER is the “front door to the hospital,” as he put it, and a safety net for many within the community.
“There are so many patients that don’t have primary-care doctors now or don’t have
insurance,” he said. “The ER is what they turn to.”
As he works with his team to improve flow, reduce wait times, and improve
the ‘leave without being seen’ numbers, Kenton relies on what might be the strongest of his many skills — listening. In fact, he’s in the waiting room every ‘admin’ day talking with not only patients, but their families as well.
“I hand out my business card to patients, talk to them, and ask, ‘why are you
here today?’” he said. “I do that as one more check to make we’re not missing something. I tell them that we’re working hard to get people through the system, and we’ll work on getting you through as soon as we can. And then, I listen.”
This brings him back to his comments about how everyone has a story, and it’s important to know and understand that story.
“You can look at the medical problem, but if you look at them as just a patient, you kind of forget that behind that patient is a person who’s scared, a family that’s scared,” he said. “Some people have lived incredible lives and been very fortunate, and some people have not had very good luck, or they’ve made bad choices, or they haven’t had the opportunities that others have had.
“I hand out my business card to patients, talk to them, and ask, ‘why are you here today?’ I do that as one more check to make we’re
not missing” something.
H26 2023
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