Vituity Regional Director Dr. Adnan Hussain (second from right) and wife Maureen Brocks-Hussain (right) join Vituity Regional Director Dr. Steven Zahn (second from left) and wife Dr. Rachel Zahn (left) with Ascension Alexian Brothers President and CEO Dan Doherty at the gala sponsor recognition event in Chicago, Illinois, on May 10, 2022.
Communities across the greater Chicago area have been dealing with unmet health needs for years. These needs range from behavioral health and substance use to access to healthcare and immunizations, food and nutrition.
“The pandemic served to exacerbate and bring those needs even more so to the forefront,” said Adnan Hussain, MD, regional director for Vituity.
With nationwide healthcare staffing shortages and increased demands for healthcare services, philanthropy is playing an increasingly important role in making healthcare accessible to all people. Above and beyond their clinical leadership, many physicians including those with Vituity have been integral to helping Ascension Illinois ministries address communities’ unmet needs through philanthropy.
“There’s a critically important link to the local communities in which we practice,” said Dr. Hussain. “Being able to contribute to those communities is a core value for many of our physician partners.”
Investing in clinical care
Vituity is enhancing emergency medicine and supporting high-impact ministries that serve the most vulnerable people in our communities through a generous annual philanthropic gift to the Ascension Illinois Foundation.
“To have Foundation resources available is a huge win for our patients,” said Justin Yee, MD, a Vituity physician who is the medical director of the emergency department (ED) at Ascension Saint Francis.
In Joliet, Vituity invested in the Heart Hospital within a Hospital at Ascension Saint Joseph — Will County’s first structural heart program. In Aurora and Hoffman Estates, their gift is improving emergency medicine for patients with psychiatric needs.
“We can’t do anything to execute our mission without community support,” said John Sullivan, DO, a Vituity physician and ED medical director at Ascension Saint Alexius.
A two-way street for hospitals and physicians
The desire to help others drives many people to become physicians, Dr. Hussain said. Philanthropy is a direct means to achieve this goal.
“For physicians it’s a symbiotic relationship with the hospital,” Dr. Hussain said. “Giving serves to deepen the relationship between the physician and hospital.”
Philanthropy goes beyond the physician’s daily practice of healing one patient at a time, Dr. Hussain added. It is a gratifying way to give back and address systemic issues like healthcare inequities. “You hope broadly speaking that it improves the health of the communities in which we work,” he said.
“A desire to go forth and do good”
The pandemic brought many health inequities to light. Dr. Hussain reflected back on the early months of the pandemic, when people in his neighborhood went outside every evening to applaud healthcare heroes who were putting themselves at risk every day to take care of their patients.
Those types of overt shows of support from the community have waned over time. However, they helped to reinforce how fortunate physicians are, Dr. Hussain said. Over the past several years, he said he has realized and come to embrace that philanthropy is not about how much you give but about with and for whom you give. It is about being a part of something bigger — something more.
“Now more than ever,” he said, “there is a desire to go forth and do good.”
