EVMS Internal Medicine – Primary Care
By Bobbie Fisher
When she was just entering high school, Jayne Penne started thinking about careers. She considered administration or computers, among others, but none appealed to her. Her father, an OR nurse at Virginia Beach Ambulatory Surgery Center, suggested she look at medicine. One of his colleagues, an anesthesiologist, invited her to come to the operating room and watch him perform a C-section. She was enraptured. “The baby was cute,” she concedes, “but I was much more interested in the procedure. I knew immediately I wanted to be in the medical field.”
Once she made up her mind, she was eager to get to work. Not wanting the time commitment (or the financial burden) of medical school, she chose the Physician Assistant program at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia, earning a Master’s in Physician Assistant Studies in 2011.
After a brief stint in orthopaedics, and a longer one in urgent care, she applied for a position at the Department of Internal Medicine at EVMS. “I’d known I wanted to work in internal medicine,” Jayne says. Joining the team at EVMS in 2013 was the perfect choice, particularly because she likes being part of a team, working hand in hand with other care providers.
In additional to working with the Internal Medicine team delivering primary care, she has assumed the role of coordinating another team: the EVMS Sickle Cell Program. Led by Dr. Ian Chen and Dr. Benjamin Goodman, the program takes care of more than 150 patients throughout Hampton Roads, getting them the treatment they desperately need. Penne works in conjunction with Sentara, CHKD and other home care agencies, as well as the United Way and the Urban League, coordinating care for these patients.
She understands well the challenges of caring for sickle cell patients, as well as the challenges the patients themselves face. “We’re dealing with people who don’t trust medicine, who don’t trust providers, who don’t trust labs – who don’t trust anyone,” she says. “But when I first started meeting them and understood more about their disease and how little help there is for it – it wrapped its arms around me and didn’t let go. These are young people whose lives have been horrendous, with all the prejudices they’ve encountered. Many develop severe morbidity from the disease, and experience pain crises, strokes, heart failure, ulcers and kidney disease.”
She is not only dedicated to caring for her patients; Jayne is equally determined to raise awareness about the prevalence of sickle cell disease in Hampton Roads, and to draw attention to the clinic. When the opportunity arose to submit a scholarly article for Today’s Wound Clinic journal, the physicians’ schedules didn’t allow time to work on it, so Penne wrote it herself. Sickle Cell Disease & Wound Care: Lower Extremity Ulcers in “Crisis” was published in the April 16, 2015 issue.
She’ll continue to write about the Sickle Cell program if the opportunity presents itself, but she doesn’t plan to rely solely on the printed page to raise awareness. She’s spearheading a run/walk for December, to be held at Norfolk’s Ocean View Park. “It’s called a Tacky Sweater 5K,” she says, “and it’s my hope that having people come together in a fun, shared activity will get information out to more patients, and attract the attention of people in the area who might know others who need the care we provide.”
Until then, she’ll continue to advocate for her patients, by working with EVMS Psychiatry to develop a support group for them, and with Pain Management to develop better treatment protocols. And she hopes at some point to be part of the team that establishes a day hospital.
