ALUMNI NEWS:
McKenzie Klein ’08 Making a Difference Through Medicine When McKenzie Klein ’08 graduates from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2022, she’ll walk away with not one, but two, graduate degrees. Now in her fourth year of medical school at UVA, she began work on her M.B.A. degree this fall at UVA’s Darden School of Business, and is only one of a handful of her classmates taking part in this five-year, dual-degree program. “I went to medical school knowing I wanted to get an M.B.A.,” she says. “Our medical system is fractured and I think one of the ways to help fix it is to give doctors more
McKenzie credits the nine years she spent at Langley with sparking her love for her two favorite subjects – English and science.
leadership roles. A lot of the decisions being made don’t make the most medical sense because the people in the board room and the physicians on the floor don’t have the same experiences.” Although she hopes to transition into an administrative leadership role at a hospital one day, McKenzie is currently focused on gaining valuable firsthand experience as a physician. Next fall, she will begin applying to residency programs, with the goal of specializing in adolescent psychiatry. “I’m very passionate about the mental health of the young adult population. Teens are often lumped into
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pediatric or adult medicine, but they are their own distinct group with very different needs,” she says, noting that she would eventually like to work alongside a family practice that integrates psychiatry. But McKenzie isn’t waiting until she has her medical degree to make a difference in the lives of teens in need. While shadowing doctors at UVA’s pediatric oncology clinic, she noticed that 2-year-old and 15-year-old patients were sharing the same waiting room and other spaces. Feeling that the older kids needed their own dedicated space, she applied for a research program to investigate the distinct needs of adolescents and pitched a partnership with Teen Cancer America to develop teen cancer programs at UVA clinics statewide. Although the pandemic has halted the grant process, the program is ready to be piloted and private donations have already provided for a new room where teen patients can play video games, listen to music, and congregate. McKenzie’s interest in teen eating disorders prompted another independent research project with the UVA Teen Health Clinic. Teens with severe eating disorders are admitted to the general medicine floor for refeeding and stabilization, but she discovered that the caretakers on that floor aren’t necessarily experts on the nuances of eating disorders. So McKenzie is assisting in the development of a three-pronged program to grow inpatient and outpatient treatment programs. She’s working with UVA physicians to develop information sheets on various eating disorders to help patients’ families understand the treatment process; create videos to train pediatric staff on how to work with eating disorder patients during mealtimes; and conduct research on the readmission rates of teen patients to provide evidence that opening an inpatient eating disorder program would benefit patients.
