Julia Haller, MD, is the ophthalmologist-in-chief at Philadelphia-based Wills Eye Hospital and a medical professor at Philadelphia-based Thomas Jefferson University. Here, she discusses what she advises her medical students, what she wishes patients knew about care and what she's learned from the pandemic.
Editor's note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: You are an executive and a surgeon. What advantage do you think physicians have in leadership roles?
Dr. Julia Haller: The advantage physicians have is that we really understand what it is like to work in the trenches of healthcare, and from our perspective as captain of the team, we have a wide bandwidth perspective on our patients and their care very much at our core. We are also trained in what Sir William Osler called "Aequanimitas" — and equanimity is a key attribute for leadership and team-building amid the storms of the healthcare environment!
Q: What makes working at a specialty hospital unique from a traditional hospital?
JH: Specialty hospitals have the wonderful unique advantage of a laser-like focus on a small part of the healthcare spectrum compared to traditional general hospitals. We can bend all our efforts toward the specific, focused goal of, in the case of our eye hospital, preserving and perfecting vision. We have a broad array of services, inpatient and outpatient, surgical and medical care, across every subspecialty from refractive surgery to pathology to oncology — but all targeting the eye. We have distinct pillars of our mission — clinical care, research and education — all again targeting the eye. We don't have the distractions or the competing needs of a general hospital: We can devote ourselves to the best, most high-intensity, cutting-edge approaches to our one vital high-impact area of concentration and excellence. And in our case of course, we are so very proud that eye health and vision have perhaps the highest impact on the quality of life of any field.
Q: As a professor, what is your favorite piece of advice you like to give medical students?
JH: I advise medical students to use their training time to dip their toe in lots of puddles — to try out many areas of medicine, to do research and participate in organizational leadership roles and educational initiatives — to really try their wings and see where they want to fly. Life is short and the art is long — find wonderful areas in our great profession where you can make your own special contributions.
Q: What is a project you are working on at Wills Eye that you're most excited about?
JH: If I had to pick one area — and that's hard because we have so many exciting initiatives on so many fronts — it would be the transformational gene therapy clinical trials going on at Wills now. It has been a huge privilege to be part of teams literally changing the defective genetic code of eyes that are going blind. To hear that a young man gradually losing all vision has been put back on track and just got his driver's license, as his grandmother recently told me, makes me know our life's work has been worthwhile.
Q: As an ophthalmologist-in-chief, what's one thing you wish patients better understood about eye health?
JH: If I could make all patients understand one thing better it would be that routine screening and checkups are vital to detect eye diseases early when we can prevent visual loss. And that no matter what their insurance and financial situation, there are options for all for access to care. It is heart-breaking to try to save vision in the end stages of diseases like glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy — diseases that in 2021 still blind so many Americans — when we have good therapies that could have kept sight if only we had been able to diagnose the conditions in time.
Q: What is the biggest lesson that you learned during the pandemic?\
JH: The biggest lesson I learned, yet again, during the pandemic was that leadership makes a difference. During crises, we all have to take a deep breath and calmly make decisions based on our best scientific data and facts and confront very human fear and panic and anxiety head-on. Working together with deliberation and skill, we can surmount the challenges and come out stronger and better, while taking care of those in need of help.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
JH: One word: gratitude. I am grateful this year more than ever before for all those who trained and mentored me — and set examples that I aspire to emulate every day. And so grateful for the team at Wills Eye Hospital that truly lives our motto of "skill with compassion" with each and every patient who enters our doors. And finally, beyond grateful to the scientific community worldwide that has steered us during this terrible pandemic, and found ways to treat the disease and now to defeat it with vaccines. We owe them so very much.