Here are four things to know about Dr. Tam.
1. Dr. Tam, 32, a family medicine physician, was not scheduled to work on the hospital’s 17th floor Friday afternoon. Instead, she had volunteered to cover another physician’s shift, The New York Times reports. Dr. Tam usually worked the ground-level family medicine clinic, where she would treat patients from the South Bronx neighborhood.
2. Colleagues described Dr. Tam — who had been working at the hospital for just over a year — as an idealistic, caring and conscientious physician. Sridhar Chilimuri, MD, physician-in-chief and chairman of the department of medicine at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, said those qualities are difficult to come by and even harder to retain in young physicians.
“Training young physicians to be doctors is an extraordinarily difficult thing,” Dr. Chilimuri told The NYT. “Making them idealistic, and also do exactly what we’re doing, is just impossible … To lose somebody like [Dr. Tam] now is really a monumental loss for us.”
3. Dr. Tam earned her medical degree at New York City-based Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2013.
4. She completed her residency at North Bergen, N.J.-based Palisades Medical Center, which is affiliated with Edison, N.J.-based Hackensack Meridian Health.
More articles on hospital-physician relationships:
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