4 minute read
NJMS People: Bringing Health Care to the Students
BY LINA ZELDOVICH
Noa’a Shimoni, MD’04, MPH, remembers the day she decided to pursue medicine as a career. She had just earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and statistics from Rutgers University, but wasn’t sure what was next. “I had a job but not a career path that was meaningful to me,” she recalls. “And I remember standing in the kitchen with my mother and brainstorming about what career could have meaning for me.”
She had learned that her grandfather, a pharmacist by profession, had always wanted to study medicine. But in prewar Poland, which set a limit on how many Jewish students could enter medical school, he didn’t make the quota, despite his qualifications. “My mom asked if I ever considered medicine—and then something clicked,” Shimoni recalls. “Working with people, solving problems, I thought that it could be a really good fit.”
That kitchen chat proved pivotal. Shimoni returned to Rutgers for her medical degree, discovering along the way that she had varied interests. “At medical school I was really interested in procedures, infectious disease, women’s health and mental health care,” she says. “Family medicine was a huge draw because I could indulge in all of these interests and still develop my niche.”
With a fellowship in family planning and a master of public health in epidemiology from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Shimoni indeed built her own specialty. “All that fit really nicely in the overall concept of health,” she notes. Consequently, she developed an all-encompassing, holistic view of health care and how it should be delivered.
Shimoni joined Rutgers as an assistant professor of family medicine and medical director of Student Health Services in 2012. She applied her holistic health care vision to the needs of the students on campus. Her view is that undergraduate and graduate life is stressful and demanding. Students shouldn’t struggle to figure out where to go with a specific medical issue, but should have one place for everything.
“I wanted to promote the idea that students can have most of their care in one place,” she shares. “I didn’t want somebody to go to one place for an infection, to another place for an IUD, and somewhere else for gender-affirming care. So whenever either I or my colleagues had the specific expertise within family medicine, we were going to offer that to students.”
Her big-picture thinking came handy during the COVID–19 pandemic, when implementing campus safety measures was crucial. Working with the university’s IT department, Shimoni led an effort to streamline COVID–19 testing at the operational level. “We built a process where students would grab a free test from a vending machine, and then, through a QR code, link that to their identifiers within our system,” she explains. “When those results came back, we knew whose results they were.” That allowed for a university-wide compliance snapshot at any given time, keeping students and faculty safe. Later, Shimoni led vaccination efforts on campus and beyond. “We worked with the New Jersey Department of Health to open vaccination sites at Rutgers in Newark, New Brunswick, and Camden,” she says. “We also ran some mobile clinics in the community and around the campus.”
Her next initiative wove yet another piece of the holistic health care puzzle into the campus canvas: mental health. In 2021, she assumed a role of acting vice president for student health services and launched a pilot program which allows students to see a mental health professional as part of NJMS’s Student Health Service (see story on page 4). “We live within complex and stressful environments, and mental health is an important part of people’s overall well-being,” Shimoni says. “I’m glad to have great support from senior leadership and my chair, Dr. Novneet Sahu, to grow the student health practice. The drive for me now is to bring health and wellness outside of the clinic. It should be accessible and available for all.”
