Pediatrician

Pediatricians care for children from the time they are born until their late teens and beyond. Medical school and 3 additional years of training prepare them to treat the gamut of youngsters' medical conditions, from colds to heart conditions and other serious chronic health concerns.

NHSC pediatricians are positioned to become heroes in the eyes of children who need them the most—kids who are sick already and in need of urgent care, as well as others who would be at high risk without timely preventive checkups and immunizations. NHSC pediatricians can also dramatically impact their community by advocating on behalf of kids' safety—working for safer playgrounds, for example, or teaching parents how essential it is to equip their cars with child safety seats.

Rodney Alford, MD
Seventeen Years Later, Still Loving a Place He Thought He'd Leave Long Ago

He met recently with President Bush on malpractice reform and speaks often with Jesse Jackson about social issues, but it's the children and adults in ultra-poor Pembroke Township, Illinois, who for 17 years have gotten first dibs on pediatrician and internist Rodney Alford's time and attention. Alford’s Med-Peds Associates provides much needed primary health care in this place—a place without its own supermarket or gas station, and a place challenged by povertyworsened problems, such as malnutrition and domestic abuse.

Alford’s selfless dedication has not gone unrecognized. He was laureled recently with humanitarian service awards, including the prestigious Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Award, as well as the Damen Award from Loyola University, his undergraduate and medical alma mater.

We asked Alford about the NHSC:

What difference has the NHSC made in your community?
Pembroke was an unknown community before I came here.Without the NHSC, there's no reason I would have landed in this community—so far from my home—to care for people I knew nothing about at the time. And I'm convinced there would be no good option for health care if we didn't come here. Now I look at the infant mortality rate that used to exist here; the teen pregnancy rate that was here; the death rate that was here; and the diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, and chronic renal disease that were here—and am proud of how much those rates have improved in the 17 years since we've come.

What difference has the NHSC made in your professional life?
Being placed here by the NHSC made me accept that things didn't necessarily have to be easy just because I'm a physician, and let me know there are better rewards than financial when it comes to medicine. In 1988, after serving my 2-year obligation with the NHSC, my plan was to go back to Chicago and serve the indigent community where I grew up, and also to go into allergy and immunology and make a lot of money. Instead, I'm here after 17 years, with no plans to go anywhere else.