Welcome to Saipan.

Commonwealth Healthcare Corporation Hospital

WHY CONSIDER SAIPAN, A PLACE YOU NEVER HEARD OF ?

You are going to be receiving innumerable recruitment packages much slicker than ours put together by well-paid PR firms. That is understandable. We have no surplus funds to pay marketing consultants. Our efforts are done by those of us who hope one day to be your colleagues. At the same time we have been putting this together, we have been heavily engaged in a myriad of projects benefiting the under-served from improving our EHR system to initiating telemedicine to treatment of problems we had not previously managed before coming . We need to provide health care for patients much sicker than we used to encounter outside of the inpatient setting within the limitations imposed by poverty and citizenship. It is an engrossing endeavor, so if our presentation lacks polish, please understand that we are heavily engaged in building a healthcare system, a fact in which we take great pride. This was the path we chose in lieu of "Médecins Sans Frontières", but the goals and many of the challenges are the same.

Most physicians receiving this have a career in mind somewhere in corporate America, and for them, the decisions will hinge on salary, benefits, and proximity to family and entertainment, this despite the statistics that over 50% of physicians in the US suffer from "burn out" in very short order. That they choose this path is perhaps understandable; the alternatives are somewhat strange and frightening. But there will be some who long for a broader professional life than that which is defined by modern American medicine, one that has not been sucked dry, one that leaves you eager to go to work every day and lets you go home knowing you made a difference. If you happen to be one of those, please let us know.

David S. Grauman MD, FACP

Adult Outpatient Medicine

Saipan, CNMI

Additional Letters About The Experience:

"Every path is one of a million paths. Every path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. Look at each path slowly and deliberately. Try it as many times as you feel necessary. Then, ask yourself and yourself alone one question : 'Does this path have a heart?"' If it does, the path is a good one. If it doesn't, it is of no use."

- Carlos Castaneda