Doctor provides award-winning area leadership
By Amy Jenkins
A typical day for Catherine Albin entails checking on a young patient with HIV, performing eye surgery on a premature baby with tear duct obstruction, operating on a child with chronic eye problems who is too nervous to be worked on in a clinic without anesthesia and going to court to testify in a shaken baby syndrome case. As chairwoman of the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (SCVMC) pediatrics department, Albin, M.D., wears many hats.
The 12-year Willow Glen resident is an expert in pediatric infectious diseases, pediatric intensive care and the diagnosis and treatment of child abuse, and she serves as an associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. But she did not always want to become a doctor.
"I originally thought I could be a good lab person," says Albin, who has no family in the medical field and began her career doing research. "I liked doing research, but I started dealing with patients and loved the clinical side of medicine."
She was thrilled to get her dream job twenty years ago at SCVMC, a unique hospital that provides medical care to anyone who walks in the door, regardless of his or her ability to pay. Even though she was raised in Sunnyvale, Albin did not know of SCVMC until she attended Stanford University, where she earned a medical degree and a doctorate degree.
As a teaching hospital and research institution, SCVMC provides Albin with the chance to work as a team with residents and students to examine, discuss and plan approaches to dealing with patients. She can also be a role model to students, just as she had teacher role models while in school, she says. Albin oversees approximately 45 patients in the winter and about 20 in the summer.
Albin is proud of the new, two-year-old pediatric facility, which allows parents to spend time with a sick child. The old facility, built in 1959, had no bathrooms or room for parents to sit by their child's bed because "the philosophy in the 50s was that parents got in the way," says Albin, who recalls that her parents were not welcome when she was in the hospital having her tonsils removed as a child.
Albin had a strong desire to care for "the sickest of the sick," or children with infectious diseases, so she took classes to become a critical care physician. When she first began as a doctor, half of her patients were outpatients and half were inpatients, but now a majority of her time is devoted to patients in the hospital.
"My colleagues and I teach, learn and live to take care of complicated patients," she says.
Over the years, Albin has been repeatedly recognized for her leadership and skill. She received a Lydia Smiley award from California School Nurses Organization for improving the health of youth and a Golden Apple award for outstanding teaching at Stanford University, and she was honored as a "woman of achievement" by the Women's Fund of Silicon Valley on March 14 for her expertise in recognizing symptoms of child abuse.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
