Dr. Evelyn Schmidt featured in Duke Magazine

Dr. Evelyn Schmidt, CEO of Lincoln Community Health Center, Inc. was featured in Duke Magazine in an article entitled, "Dr. Yes."  This article highlights the beginnings of Dr. Schmidt's career, her motivation and commitment to the mission of Lincoln Community Health Center Inc., and her leadership to make the Health Center innovative and trendsetting in the wake of an ever-changing and challenging health care environment.  Below is an excerpt:

"The general public doesn't recognize the quality of care Lincoln provides because of who they serve there," says Joyce Nichols, who has used the center for her health-care needs for thirty-five years. "The people there don't care how you're dressed or how you look or smell. They treat you with respect, and they treat you as well as or better than any other medical provider in town."

Schmidt makes sure of that. Lincoln's chief executive since shortly after it opened in 1970, she possesses a commitment to serving the poor that borders on a passion and has become the center's guiding principle in a continually changing health-care industry. Although she and her staff readily adjust to the times—Schmidt's office door features a picture of a dinosaur with the caption "Adapt or Die"—providing high-quality medical care to patients on the margins of society is the steady foundation of the center.

"Most of our patients have been pretty much left out in the cold by the health-care system," she says. "The only way we're going to succeed as a nation is if we're healthier and better educated—and I mean everybody has to be provided for." Durham, she says, is "a tale of two cities," with Duke Medical Center's world-class facilities and pioneering research taking place a stone's throw from the bleak financial and social conditions faced by Lincoln's clientele. 

To read the entire article, please click on the title link.