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Director of the AU Medical Clinic
CAMPUS
Dr. Fred Kam, Dr. Ricardo Maldonado and Brooke Bailey hold a press conference to address the threat of coronavirus on March 5, 2020.
FILE PHOTO
Dr. Kam, director of the AU Med Clinic, shares his story
By COLLINS KEITH Assistant Editor
While a brief glance at the plaques and accolades around his office reveals that he is a man of many talents, Dr. Frederick Kam, director of the Auburn University Medical Clinic, is a family man.
With three grown daughters and a wife and mother-in-law at home, Kam has a love for welcoming people. He is committed to dinner with his daughter’s boyfriend and Auburn college game days with family and friends.
And that love for community is what brought him to Auburn.
Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Kam’s attitude and capabilities were quickly recognized by both his teachers and parents at a young age, and preparations were made to send him to high school in England.
While his future was laid out for him from a young age, for Kam, the decision really only came down to two professions.
“I’ve only ever wanted to become two things in my life. One was a doctor, and the second was a Catholic priest,” said Kam with a laugh. “The Catholic priest went out the door when I was 12 years old; I guess puberty, hormones, whatever you want to call it … I was like, not priesthood, medicine.”
According to Kam, he knew he wanted to study medicine by age seven. While he had an intrinsic love for it, attending Catholic school and seeing commercials and documentaries on TV about children in Africa in need of medical care only served to reinforce those ideals.
“In those days and times, they used to have these documentaries or ads that would show you, which would just tear at your heart, kids starving in Ethiopia and Uganda and the Congo,” said Kam. “So you always felt that you [had]to go there … that you had to do what you [could]. [It] was very emotionally moving.”
For high school, Kam moved to Birkenhead, England, right across the Mersey river from Liverpool. It was there that he further developed his skills and prepared for University; not in Trinidad and Tobago or England, but in the States, at the University of Miami.
At Miami, as much as he enjoyed studying medicine, Kam loved learning about all the new American sports that he hadn’t been exposed to in Trinidad and Tobago or England.
“When I came in as a Freshman, I came in as an international student. I played British sports my whole life: cricket, soccer; which I call football, tennis, badminton, all those things,” said Kam. “So as a freshman at the University of Miami, I had to learn American sports; one of which was football. So I was very excited about learning new things.”
At the University of Miami, according to Kam, he also got very involved with Student Government. As an international student in just his second semester at college, Kam co-led the SGA campaign at Miami, and as a sophomore, Kam was the chief-of-staff to the SGA president.
Kam took an accelerated course load at the University of Miami, and after three years, he graduated, applying and being accepted into medical school at Miami. In medical school, Kam was named president of his class.
After completing medical school, Kam finished his schooling at Miami by completing an internal res- idency, graduating in 1986. He then worked at the University of Miami briefly, before transitioning over to be the chief medical officer at Collegiate Healthcare, a company that manages healthcare at colleges and universities, both in the U.S. and in Canada.
According to Kam, while he enjoyed his work at Collegiate Healthcare, his work caused him to be away from his wife and two children more often than he would have liked.
“Back in those days … I travelled about 40 weeks a year in airplanes. It was not why I became a doctor,” said Kam. “But I was trying to make my impact on im- proving the delivery of healthcare at colleges and uni- versities.”
It just so happened that, in 1996, Collegiate Health- care decided to accept a bid from Auburn to rework their student healthcare, in which Kam led a transi- tion team to take over what was then the Drake health center. It was in these nine months of travel back and forth to Auburn that Kam fell in love with the town.
“So I wanted to stop travelling as much, I wanted to go back to the practice of medicine, and Auburn was just the right location, right time, all of those,” said Kam. “I [had] this epiphany that I needed to change what I was doing … I was not watching my two chil- dren, spending time with them. I was basically [only] home on the weekends.”
The timing of Kam’s epiphany could not have been any better, according to Kam. Since he was the chief medical officer of the implementation of the updates student health services here at Auburn, hiring the staff was one of his jobs. So when he realized he wanted to be here in Auburn, Kam just simply hired himself.
“So I interviewed myself, and hired myself to come to Auburn!” Kam said with a laugh. “The truth is that we had done a search and we got down to our final two candidates, and literally the weekend before we were to interview the final two candidates was the weekend I had the epiphany.” 25 years later, Kam still loves living and working at Auburn. According to Kam, in the first few years of his appointment at Auburn, many companies and universities approached him with job offers, but he put a stop to that soon after coming to Auburn.
For Kam, some of his most memorable moments came in his graduation from high school and college. Neither of his parents graduated high school, so for Kam, his successes mean even more.
“Graduating from college, and then from high school definitely are up there, because again, you
know … there were no doctors in the family. I was your first generation college student,” said Kam.
Kam also values the positive impact that he and his team at the med clinic have been able to have on stu- dents.
“Through the years, the team at the clinic and I have made significant positive impacts on a number of stu- dents, and helping them to achieve their dream of graduating from Auburn,” said Kam. “Some of them had health issues and other things that we had to man- age, or in some cases, diagnose, or treat, to get them to successfully complete their degrees at Auburn.”
According to Kam, most every year, after gradua- tion, families come to the med clinic to bring gifts, to meet him and his staff, and to say thanks. Unfortu- nately, due to Covid-19, these visits, at least in person, have had to stop, at least momentarily.
For Kam, his team at the med clinic have been in- strumental in the successes seen throughout the pan- demic.
“I think we have positioned the medical clinic to serve Auburn incredibly well,” said Kam. “When Covid-19 hit Lee county back in March, on March 16th, we had a tent erected, we had a plan, we had staff and clinicians out there screening patients. When testing first became available, we were the only college health center in the state that made testing available.
According to Kam, as more types of tests became available, like commercially sold tests as well as rap- id tests, his med clinic was some of the first to gain ac- cess to and provide these tests to the public. He cred- its this fact to the relationships he and his team have made over the years, as well as the tenacity of his staff.
“I think we’ve done a phenomenal job, to be honest. When I look back, there’s nothing else I could say, “oh, we could have done this better,” or “we could have done more of that,” said Kam. “As of yesterday [Au- gust 7th], the clinic has performed over 9,000 tests. Right now, in the country, I know we’re one of a few that can offer the full gamut of tests available. That’s the antigen, the PCR, and the antibody; all the above.”
While Kam has been busy overseeing the imple- mentation of safety measures for students coming back to campus this semester, he still hasn’t lost any love for his job, or for Auburn.
“For right now? I love what I do, and my plan is to continue doing it until that point that I’ll say, okay, ei- ther I don’t love it anymore, or it’s time for someone else to get an opportunity, or maybe Auburn doesn’t love it anymore,” Kam said with a smile. “I do what I’m doing because I love it. And I’m doing it at Auburn be- cause I love Auburn.”
