People notes : Allston man honored by AAPA

townonline.com Friday, May 9, 2003

The American Academy of Physician Assistants has selected Cameron R. Macauley of Allston as the recipient of its 2003 Humanitarian Physician Assistant of the Year Award. The award will be presented May 21 in New Orleans at AAPA's 31st annual Physician Assistant Conference.

Since 1984, Macauley has provided medical care, surgical care and health education to people in six countries on three continents. He has learned to speak, read and write five languages: Bahasa, Crioulo, Portuguese, Yanomami, and Fulani, as well as to converse in a sixth, Khmer.

During his career, Macauley has opened and supervised outpatient community clinics in Guinea-Bissau, Brazil and on the Thai-Cambodian border, and provided immunization services in southern Angola, an area that had not had such a program for 10 years. He also supervised the collection and analysis of more than 10,000 blood smears for malaria during an epidemic in the Brazilian Amazon and coordinated medical relief efforts during a cholera epidemic in South Central Angola in 1994.

Macauley has designed and taught courses for nurses, surgical technicians, health agents, vaccinators and microscopists in places where such programs had not previously existed and created course materials in native languages. "In 17 years I have taught over 1,000 students, always in their own languages," said Macauley. Most recently, he established the first training program for Yanomami indigenous health agents in Brazil, where he also trained the first Yanomami malaria microscopists.

"Cameron recognized that education is a fundamental activity in the fight for human rights," wrote Dr. Sandra Gomes de Almeida, from Sao Paulo, Brazil, in a letter of recommendation.

"The self-esteem and ambition that Cameron inspired in his students will continue to make an enormous difference in their future and will, I believe, shape the grassroots health education in Brazil."

Macauley has also advocated for human rights outside of his clinical work and teaching. In 1994, while living and providing medical care in Angola, he launched a protest against local police and military staff who were illegally conscripting health care workers for military service. In 1986, while managing an outpatient clinic that served 30,000 refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border, he led protests against human rights violations at the Suan Phlu Immigration Detention Center in Bangkok.

Macauley says that one of the greatest challenges he has found in his work is "overcoming the lack of motivation of students due to chronic poverty and in some cases war, to inspire them to learn how to provide basic health care services." He is currently working with Physician Assistants for Global Health, an AAPA-recognized special interest group, to encourage PAs to work overseas in humanitarian assistance, as well as researching cost-effective malaria control strategies for Amerindian groups in Venezuela and Brazil.

The Humanitarian Physician Assistant of the Year Award, supported by Pfizer Inc., honors a physician assistant who has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to human rights and exemplifies the PA profession's philosophy of providing accessible and quality health care in geographic locations inside and outside of the United States. Macauley will be presented a crystal PAragon Award and a check for $2,500. A matching contribution will be given in his name to Cultural Survival.