Dr. Erica Sutton
EXCELLENCE IN
COMMUNITY SERVICE
D
2016 DOCTORS’ BALL PHYSICIAN HONOREES
r. Erica Sutton loves a good challenge. A native of Buffalo, New York
who grew up in Fairmont, West Virginia, she says as a child she considered careers in law, medicine and as President of the United States.
A triple threat as an Indiana University, Bloomington undergraduate, in four
years she earned three separate degrees in psychology, chemistry and mathematics, before moving on to medical school at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore. There, she found it was surgery that ignited her passion more than
any other area of medicine. But she also knew that in addition to the grueling
hours and demanding cases, surgery could be a particularly challenging specialty for a woman – and an African American woman, at that. “I was hoping
to love something more,” she says now with a smile.
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But Sutton pushed forward with a surgical residency at the University of
Maryland in Baltimore, a National Institute of Health sponsored post-doctoral
fellowship in violence research at Johns Hopkins, and a fellowship in minimally invasive surgery at the University of Maryland. When she accepted a
position in 2011 as assistant professor in the University of Louisville Hiram
C. Polk, Jr., MD, Department of Surgery, Dr. Sutton came both as a surgeon
and as an educator, says U of L School of Medicine Dean Dr. Toni Ganzel. “I
had the experience of observing her working with students,” Dr. Ganzel says.
“She was bright, organized and funny, and really able to engage the students
in a very energetic and enthusiastic way.”
Shortly after settling into dual roles as practitioner and mentor – she’s now
also U of L Assistant Dean of Medical Education – Dr. Sutton added another
challenge to her portfolio. As a founder of Surgery on Sunday, modeled from
a program in Lexington, she took on a project designed to provide free care to
uninsured and under-insured patients in the community on several Sundays
each year, when surgical facilities are generally not in use.
“A lot of people were bringing up the barriers, the reasons it was going to
be difficult,” Sutton recalls. “But what I said is, it’s the right thing to do.” Since
the first Surgery on Sunday event in 2013, the project has served more than
200 patients treated by 25 physicians and hundreds of other medical and lay
volunteers in seven different local health care facilities, including every hospital
organization in Louisville. Procedures performed have included endoscopies
and colonoscopies – and at least one case of colon cancer, diagnosed and
cured. Every bit of the care has been provided at no cost to the patients, some
but not all of whom are homeless.
LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
Sam Walling was one of the volunteers drawn to Surgery on Sunday by Dr.
Sutton’s passion. Now a fourth year medical student at U of L, Walling started
working with Surgery on Sunday as a first year student and now serves as
its medical director. He says the most important thing he’s lea