Episode 14: Dr. Debra Hermany

Today, Sonia sits down with one of the true champions of the healthcare industry. Learn how Dr. Debra Hermany progressed from receiving a nursing degree at RACC, to becoming an emergency room physician in a Veteran’s Administration Hospital. Dr. Hermany discusses the challenges of a (very) front line worker during the height of the pandemic to discussing the many future opportunities and careers in healthcare. A do not miss episode for anyone pursuing a career in the health professions.

Thank you for listening! For more information about RACC, visit us online. Stay connected, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Transcript

Sonia Rieger  0:10  
Hey y'all and welcome back to the RACC podcast. Now is a great time to check out our last episode where we spoke with Kristen Taylor about her recent graduation from the nursing program and her new rewarding career. Today's episode features another story of how a nursing degree from RACC can lead to you being an emergency room physician in a Veterans Administration hospital. We are continuing our quest to share our graduate successes by welcoming a doctor who has done just that. Please welcome Dr. Deborah Hermany. 

Dr. Debra Hermany  0:38  
Hello. 

Sonia Rieger  0:39  
Welcome. Thank you for being with us today. 

Dr. Debra Hermany  0:41  
You're welcome. 

Sonia Rieger  0:42  
So I'd love to start at the beginning. And you have to tell me what was RACC. Like when you attended school here?

Dr. Debra Hermany  0:47  
Well, I was here from 1976 to 1978. And RACC, was located in the riverside school elementary school at that time, and we had four modular buildings behind the school that were the nursing program, thinking all of them belong to us, but I'm not sure exactly anyway. So we did all our classes. And our own library, we had our own library, and all of our educators were in that in those buildings. So I only actually had one class in the riverside school building. And that was anatomy and physiology. The rest of my classes I had previously taken at private college before it came to RACC, so I didn't need to repeat those.

Sonia Rieger  1:31  
Okay, so what initially brought you here, since you had had some experience before that,

Dr. Debra Hermany  1:35  
um, I was encouraged by my roommate was a nurse who graduated from lankinen nursing program. And at the time, I was not sure that it was going to be able to continue on in pre med because of the finances. And she encouraged me to come to RACC thinking that I could do nursing instead of being a physician. And I thought it was a good idea. I checked into it at $17 a credit it was certainly very reasonable. And so I came down to the program talk to Anna May was who was the chief of Nursing at that time, okay, and it looked like a good program. So I came here at that time. And then we had rotations that we did to all the local hospitals and the nursing homes, etc. And that kind of encouraged me to keep going as I got into my senior year, senior trimester. My second year, I was more encouraged to go back to college and finish my my BS degree. So that's why I continued on and then went to medical school after that.

Sonia Rieger  2:38  
Okay, so was your bachelors in nursing or did you continue into the medical profession?

Dr. Debra Hermany  2:43  
No, my associate's degree was in nursing from RACC. my bachelor's was in biology.

Sonia Rieger  2:47  
Okay. Oh, awesome. So what made you decide to go to your pre med school? Why did you choose that school specifically,

Dr. Debra Hermany  2:54  
I started at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales, because at the time they were listed as having a 75% entrance rate in the medical schools, and it was really high interest rates. So my class that actually started that year in 1973, was 70 some students and we were all interested in going to medical school because we all saw the same ad. What we didn't know was that statistics, lets them have four people apply for medical school and three get in so they can list at a 75% chance rate. But um, so I went there two years and then I transferred to Kutztown locally. I did Kutztown for a year before it came to RACC and then I finished at Kutztown after I finished it RACC

Sonia Rieger  3:41  
okay and so I know you also attended the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. That's correct. Okay, so can you tell our listeners what that means? What Osteopathic Medicine mean?

Dr. Debra Hermany  3:52  
Well, osteopathic medicine is the four years of medical school that you would normally do in an MD program but in addition to your four years of Osteopathic manipulation and kind of muscle management, I guess is the best way to say it. They are the osteopaths are much more in tune to teaching family practice general medicine pediatrics, obstetrics emergency medicine, like the basic medical programs and like an all round they saw at one point listed it as homeopathic but it's it's really just a generalized good medicine. Now, today, they allow people who are MDS to come to the osteopathic schools and as part of their residency program, take the osteopathic classes and learn to do that on top of their medical degree. So it's just like an additional additional thing that I learned while I was in school. And it was nice because it was in Philadelphia and I could come home and close by you know, and I got to do rotations in the area hospitals. Allentown York, Lancaster, Reading, you know, I was able to stay close to home

Sonia Rieger  5:00  
Okay, oh, that's awesome. Okay. So what was your career like after you graduated? Where did you go first

Dr. Debra Hermany  5:06  
I went to Long Island and I did an internship in Long Island for a year. That poor little hospital got washed away in Sandy. And we were six of us six interns. We were our first class of interns there. And it was really a nice little hospital, it was very busy 252 beds, and we had an additional 300 plus bed nursing home next door that we took care of. And after that, I did a residency at Geisinger Medical Center. And then from there, I started working, and I've been in ER medicine for 34 years now.

Sonia Rieger  5:40  
So I imagine that your work has changed a little bit over the past year and a half. So can you tell us about maybe what's changed and how your education helped prepare you for those changes?

Dr. Debra Hermany  5:51  
Actually, I think some of my nursing education helped me the most, because everything that we do today is about being safe. So I work at the VA now. And our rooms are private rooms are set up. So that if you come in with any symptoms that are COVID related, you're automatically put into a room, you're not interviewed in the general areas where everybody else is interviewed. And then we as physicians have to be bound and protected with PPE, or personal protective equipment. And all of those things really came out of the nursing program in the as basics that we learned, I remember learning over at the reading hospital, actually, as a nursing student, and they follow through today, everything is still the same way. I would say, Well, we've gotten past the largest majority of the COVID. But we're starting to see a rack up in numbers again recently in the last month. And I think we're going back into a little bit more COVID related symptoms Now again, and it's it's really hard to understand why people cannot just be keep themselves safe and clean. And I have a hard time with that. And now and I think that was one thing that came out of COVID is that it's taught everybody wash your hands.

Sonia Rieger  7:13  
Talk to me a little bit about what the career outlook is for someone who wants to go into healthcare.

Dr. Debra Hermany  7:18  
Healthcare, in general, there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of opportunity in nursing, they pretty much can run the gamut from any kind of hospital, nursing home, all of the insurance companies are hiring nurses, all of the companies that do billing are hiring nurses, you can pretty much do whatever you want. It's whatever your desire is to to work into. I used my nursing education to give me the finances to get through medical school. But it was a great background, you know, I got to work in surgical ICU and work in the operating room and do things that I would have never been able to do prior to medical school if I hadn't had that nursing license. But it did financially help me get through school. That was important.

Sonia Rieger  8:04  
Sure, of course. And that sounds a lot like the program that we have here. Now, our students have two years here when they're in the program, and they get a lot of experience in a lot of different clinical settings, including the hospitals and the doctors offices, much like what you talked about earlier. So they really get that nice foundation to know kind of which direction they would like to go. 

Dr. Debra Hermany  8:23  
That's good. That's what they need. 

Sonia Rieger  8:26  
So I know in our local health care facilities that some health care professionals retired, others left the industry. And I know that some elective procedures were also put on hold during COVID. So can you tell me how that impacted the industry?

Dr. Debra Hermany  8:39  
There are nursing jobs. Absolutely. Not just nursing jobs, there's physician jobs, there's all kinds of medical jobs across the board, in every hospital and in every part of the industry, because it's so many people retired, or just said I'm done. I don't want to be exposed to this or can't expose my family this. Or in some cases, I had nurses who had to quit because they had nobody take care of their children at home, because the kids weren't going to school. So all those things, everything has to kind of the wheels have to go back into motion again before it's going to be for it's going to catch up and it's going to take a long time. 

Sonia Rieger  9:15  
How long do you think that will last? 

Dr. Debra Hermany  9:17  
I would say you're going to look at about 10 years before you're going to be back to where we were. Yeah. And it's the way it happens. It's the way life is. I work in the urgent care now for Reading per diem and we see a lot a lot of our urgent cares are packed. They're packed full of people. And I'm not sure I mean sometimes I have people who will tell me that they couldn't get an appointment with their family doctor because they were full. But I'm not sure if that's all of it. I don't know if some some of them have just gone out of business and they don't have no place to go or if they're not trying to get an appointment but we're so full and so busy and easily you know easily every one of us sees 30, 40, 50 patients a day a piece and we're packed. The emergency room is packed every time I go over, it's packed. So I don't know what the differences I personally don't know why all of a sudden, all the people aren't going back to their primary care if they're just aren't there. As far as the elective surgeries and things were put on hold that was put on the backburner, of course for almost a year. And slowly, they started to go back to the surgeries, I think pretty much they're operating back to close to normal schedules. Of course, everything has to be on an appointment time, everything you get done lab work appointment time, you can't just walk in and wait in line anymore. And that's just to protect everybody. But I think overall, it's going to probably give us about 10 years before we're going to go back to where we were, it's unfortunate, but there's not enough help. We can't open departments, every single hospital that I talked to, they have to rotate departments that are closed, because they don't have nursing staff, and they desperately need them. And I know, I know that the nursing school, the graduates coming out of the nursing school are going right into jobs. You know, when I graduated from school, you had to work two years on a general floor before they were going to give you any opportunity to work in a bigger area like the OR or the ER, ICU, you know, you needed two years of general education and time, mostly to get yourself settled, learn the medicines, learn a routine, learn the computer or the paperwork, whatever it was you had to learn. And then once you got yourself settled, then they could try to move you up into more expansive areas. Now, they just don't have that kind of time. They don't have the luxury of that time. And they're moving them faster into more involved areas, you know, step down units and cardiology units and stuff like that. And they kind of have to teach them on the run.

Sonia Rieger  11:53  
So does that mean their orientation process has changed a little bit? You know, like you said, they would normally have two years of you to learn their basic skills and get those honed in?

Dr. Debra Hermany  12:02  
It hs, it has and I mean, I think you still get six months of orientation, no matter where you go. That's pretty much standard in the industry. But I think they really do move you faster into areas where they really need you they need they need the people in those areas to function. So they move them along faster.

Sonia Rieger  12:21  
So as you know, this is our 50th anniversary year. So do you have a message that you'd like to share with our campus community and Dr. Looney on this occasion?

Dr. Debra Hermany  12:29  
I think that they've done a great job over the last 50 years, I've come back to take computer classes here. And I've been in the Schmidt center multiple times for classes and gotten to speak to some of the students there. And I think that overall, there's a lot of opportunity here, I've looked at the booklets that come out when they get ready to start the new semesters. And I see that there's a lot of opportunity there for people to get into programs that I never even knew existed. I think that overall the school has done a great job I you know, hope that they continue on, I think they provide a good background for a lot of people in this area. And it's reasonably, again, reasonably priced. You know, some people can't, some people can't travel, some people have families, whatever their instance is, I think it gives them a good opportunity to stay here and be able to move forward. When I was at the Schmidt center, I got the ability to talk to a lot of guys who come in, work in come to school in the evenings, working during the daytime, and they're advancing themselves in their in their careers at the jobs that they already have. And it's nice to see that

Sonia Rieger  13:34  
I definitely agree with you. I think that one of the things we excel here at RACC in particular is meeting people in the community exactly where they are. So if they've been out of the workforce, or if they've been out of school, or maybe they're just out of high school, or they have families or jobs or other responsibilities, we really have program short term and long term that meet those needs, and help them get that education that they need to be successful. 

Dr. Debra Hermany  13:57  
I agree. 

Sonia Rieger  13:58  
Just on a final note, what advice would you give to our listeners and any maybe future doctors about their careers and education?

Dr. Debra Hermany  14:05  
Just keep nose to the grindstone, you can do it, there are always going to be stumbling blocks. No matter where you go. No matter what you do in life, you're going to come up to things that you'd never expected. And you just have to teach yourself a way to get around it and you can keep on moving forward. I see a lot of people who go back to school after they've been out working for a while, have a family etc. And they do very, very well. And I think for the most part at least I saw that at PCM. If you had a background, a little bit of a background where you had a job and had a family or whatever knew this is what you really wanted to do. You were had actually had a better chance of getting in then somebody just fresh out of school, you know, that never had any experience. So I think if you keep moving, you can go forward very easily.

Sonia Rieger  14:52  
That's great advice. Thank you for sharing. 

Dr. Debra Hermany  14:54  
Sure. 

Sonia Rieger  14:54  
Thank you so much for being here. 

Dr. Debra Hermany  14:56  
Absolutely. 

Sonia Rieger  14:56  
Really appreciate it. It was really interesting talking to you and hearing about your career path and everything and always good to talk to another alumni. If Dr Harmony's story has inspired you today, we can help you achieve those goals to the RACC nursing Associate of Applied Science offers state of the art classroom and lab technologies and gives you a variety of experience at offices and hospitals throughout our region. Upon graduation, you will be well prepared to enter the workforce in an in demand field. The need for healthcare professionals is high as you've heard today, so get started right now. To learn more visit www.racc.edu/hp. Come back and listen to us each week as we share more stories of our successful graduates. And don't forget, this is our 50th year of excellence. Check out fifty.racc.edu to see how we're planning our celebration. I am Sonia Rieger on the Reading Area Community College podcast and I can't wait to see you next time. Bye.