Welcome to Saipan.

A letter from our medical staff

Why consider Saipan, a place you never heard of?

You are going to receive 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 made by those of us who hope one day to be your colleagues.

While we have been putting this together, we have also been heavily engaged in a myriad of projects benefiting the underserved, from improving our EHR system to starting telemedicine to treating problems we had not managed before coming here. We provide health care for patients much sicker than we used to encounter outside 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 decision will hinge on salary, benefits, and proximity to family and entertainment, despite statistics showing that over 50% of U.S. physicians suffer from burnout 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 the one 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