“When a young person asks me about careers in healthcare, whether medical, behavioral or another avenue, my reply is immediate: ‘There are easier ways to make a living, but there is no better way to make a living.’ ”
Thanks, Michael for joining us at Ocean State Stories. You came to our attention from Wood River Health, the Federally Qualified Health Center that offers a wide range of services to people in southern Rhode Island and where you serve on the board of trustees. We have written about them often. Let’s start with your background.
I was born and raised in the Arlington section of Cranston. When I was six years old, my father built a small cottage in Point Judith, overlooking the open ocean. I thus had the ocean in my blood at a very young age. I attended LaSalle Academy and then graduated from Providence College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. I next entered a Ph.D. program in Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Rhode Island. I soon discovered I did not feel fulfilled doing scientific research. My older sister is a physician, and her career path inspired me to pursue a career in clinical medicine.
Where and when did you earn your Doctorate of Osteopathic Medicine?
I was drawn to primary care as a line of work and thus pursued studies at the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine in Biddeford, Maine. Upon acceptance to the program, I then needed a means of paying tuition. I applied to and was accepted in the Navy’s Health Professions Scholarship Program and was commissioned an Ensign in the United States Navy in June, 1979, before beginning medical studies.
Upon graduation in 1983, I did my internship at the Naval Hospital, Oakland, California. At that time, upon completion of internship, most young doctors in the Navy served with the fleet before beginning residency. As a result, upon completion of my internship, I flew from San Francisco to Singapore, met my ship, USS Denver (LPD-9), and five days later we set sail for Africa. This type of adventure made time in the Navy intriguing. After two years at sea, I did a residency in Family Medicine at the Naval Hospital, Camp Pendleton, California. At this point in my life, I was not certain I would make the Navy a career but I was getting good training, was working with good people, and the mission was noble: providing primary care to the active-duty Navy, their families and retirees.
As one ascends in rank in the military, administrative responsibility becomes a part of your job. I invited this. I enjoyed the combination of a clinical as well as a leadership role. Having early experience in the fleet, I pursued positions in the ‘operational Navy’, that is, with ships afloat, with the Marine Corps (with the Marine Corps being a part of the Department of the Navy) and overseas assignments.
It was in this operational pipeline that I had life-changing experiences.
Let’s hear about some of them. And since this is Veterans Day, thanks for your service.
I was Senior Medical Officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) at the time of the 9/11 attacks. We got underway one week later and engaged in combat operations in the North Arabian Sea for the next five months as the US and NATO allies took on the Taliban in pursuit of holding Osama bin Laden accountable for 9/11. In addition to leading the medical team caring for the small city that constitutes the crew of an aircraft carrier, I was also medical advisor to the Battle Group Commander, the one-star admiral who oversaw the ten-ship battle group. As a result, my responsibilities included making site visits to these smaller ships (helicopter hops) to help see the more complicated patients and to complete ongoing quality review of each ship’s Medical Department.
On a subsequent tour, I was assigned as the Fleet Surgeon for the United States SEVENTH FLEET. I was on the staff of the three-star admiral who was the Fleet Commander, responsible for operations afloat from Hawaii to the middle of the Indian Ocean. I thus had oversight responsibility of medical operations throughout the fleet with the numbers of deployed sailors at any given time being approximately 20,000. Also, in addition to working at the top-secret level on the medical annexes of the war plans for that part of the world, I also helped plan and participated in humanitarian and disaster relief operations throughout the southern Pacific Ocean and east Asia.
The most consequential tour of my career was as Commanding Officer of the NATO Role 3 Multinational Medical Unit at Kandahar Airfield. The tour was one year, 2010-2011, a time frame of intense battle in that region. During my year there we took in 2,000 casualties, to include 300 Afghan children, recording a 97% survival rate. We were able to record such historic numbers despite the fact we were face to face with the Taliban, being the target of approximately 100 rocket attacks during my tour. This tour was military medicine at its best. I am currently working on a memoir about that tour and the magnificent men and women with whom I served.
I retired from the Navy in 2013. As I like to say, “I owed the Navy four years for a scholarship, and I stayed for 30.” No regrets.
On retirement, you were a family physician at the Elliot Health System in Manchester, N.H. Please elaborate.
Upon retiring, I took a position as Staff Family Physician and Executive Medical Director for Outpatient Medicine with the Elliot Health System in Manchester, New Hampshire. After two years, I stepped down from the administrative position, choosing to focus on patient care. At the time of the pandemic, my wife, Kathleen Marra, and I moved back to Rhode Island to be closer to family and friends. We had lived around the world and chose to live in Rhode Island. I was contemplating stepping back from clinical medicine at that time. The move was a natural fault line in our lives.
Once in Rhode Island, Kathleen became involved with her high school alma mater, St. Mary’s Academy, Bay View, serving on their Board of Directors. There she met Alison Croke, President and CEO of Wood River Health, the Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in Hope Valley. Kathleen learned that Wood River had need for providers. With that, I interviewed for and joined the staff of Wood River Health as a staff physician. I look at the time at Wood River as the most gratifying clinical work I had ever done. The mission of the FQHC is to provide care for all those who need care, no one is turned away. Every day at Wood River is an ‘all hands on deck’ evolution. There is integrated care with medical care and behavioral health care. Their Community Health Workers are tireless in extending the umbrella of care from the office to the home. And the available services offer the convenience of ‘one stop shopping’ for the patients with medical care, behavioral health care, physical therapy, laboratory and pharmacy services all located under one roof.
In 2023, I had been in medical practice for 40 years. This seemed a notable milestone, so I elected to retire from clinical practice. Soon after leaving Wood River Health, however, a high school colleague of mine from LaSalle Academy, Jonathan Houston, contacted me. He was the founder and CEO of the Cranston based non-profit Justice Assistance, first opening its doors in 1978. Their mission is dedicated to those who are justice involved and their victims, providing employment and education services, life skill development and behavioral health services. Jonathan explained Justice Assistance had just received a generous grant, a stipulation of which was that Justice Assistance offer health care to their clients. He asked if I would help establish the mechanisms for Justice Assistance to open a primary care clinic for their clients. For the past two years we’ve been doing just that. Now with a new CEO, Jake Bassillion, at the helm, Justice Assistance began seeing patients in July 2025 and is serving as primary care provider for this disenfranchised population. A Family Nurse Practitioner is the primary care giver with me serving as her back up, seeing only a handful of patients per week to lighten the load.
I continue to work in medicine because I love my work. I enjoy the detective work required to make diagnoses and to implement care to address those diagnoses. I have a skill set that took a lot of work to establish, and even now requires daily reading to remain current and to maintain board certification status with the American Board of Family Medicine. But it’s plain to see, there is a need for that skill set, so I am pleased I can take a few hours of my time per week to contribute to the noble effort at Justice Assistance. Same was true at Wood River.
This is a fractured time in American healthcare. What keeps you and fellow practitioners at Wood River and elsewhere going?
When a young person asks me about careers in healthcare, whether medical, behavioral or another avenue, my reply is immediate: “There are easier ways to make a living, but there is no better way to make a living.” When I was a young physician, I was discouraged that everyone you met in the exam room that day would have a complaint, and often the basis of that complaint was self-induced behavior, whether that be excess weight, excess consumption of alcohol or drugs, the lack of exercise, or whatever. But at this stage of my life and career, I understand, that’s life. These are good people with tough problems. I’ve worked hard to develop and maintain the skill set to help and have the opportunity to contribute to the effort. I can do that.
