A Special Touch of Leadership
Dr. Geraldine Urse has a passion for the profession

by Heide Aungst
Photos by John Sattler

After years working as a nurse anesthetist, Geraldine Urse, D.O. (’93),might have chosen to become an anesthesiologist. But instead she chose to go into family medicine in order to be closer to her patients and to experience the continuity of care.

“Family medicine is the one that has it all,” Dr. Urse said. “It has infants. It has geriatrics. It has well people. It has people with illness. It has people with conditions they’ll get over immediately, and some with conditions that will last the rest of their lives. I have the ability to be in my office and to do procedures and to teach — the greatest thing we do as physicians.”

As an associate professor of family medicine at OU-HCOM, Dr. Urse often sees patients with the residents and students, teaching as she performs medical procedures and showing how to build trust through a simple touch.

It’s that special touch that sets her apart.
“The way she touches her patients, the way she shakes people’s hands, I learned that from her,” said Tinisha Cheatham, D.O. (’00), a family medicine physician with Kaiser Permanente in Suitland, Md. Dr. Cheatham served her residency in family medicine at Doctors Hospital under Dr. Urse. “Watching her listen to and talk to patients, I learned how to make a patient feel comfortable and know that I’m listening and here to help.”

Dr. Urse, who received the 2010 Alumna of the Year award from the OU-HCOM Society of Alumni and Friends, is a strong advocate for the osteopathic profession — and the power of touch that the profession fosters. “I think because we are trained in manipulation, we are comfortable touching people,” Dr. Urse said. “And, so it tends to be more of a closer, almost in-your-personal-space type of relationship that you develop with patients.” Dr. Urse worked for more than a decade as a nurse anesthetist at Doctors Hospital in Columbus before deciding at age 40 to go to medical school. A doctor she knew had just been accepted to law school. “He realized if he didn’t try, he would never know if he could have done it or not. I was sitting there listening to him, and thinking, ‘I’m in the same boat. If I don’t try this, I’ll never know,’” she said.

She believes her late husband, John S. Urse, Jr., D.O., FACOS, a 1955 graduate of the Des Moines Still College of Osteopathy and Surgery, was as surprised as she was when she got into medical school, but he soon became her biggest supporter and role model.

“He had a great work ethic. He had a wonderful eye for fairness and equality, and the ability to treat everybody as the most important person in the world,” she said.

Dr. Urse honored him by naming a conference room in the new Osteopathic Heritage Foundations Academic & Research Center after him: the John S. Urse, D.O., Family Medicine Conference Room.

“He felt so strongly about education that when I decided to do something in his memory, it was apparent that doing something at the college that would provide a space for people to learn in would be the best tribute I could make to him,” she said.

She has also endowed a scholarship
in both their names.
When her husband retired to Las Vegas, she worked as assistant director of the Family Medicine and Community Health Residency at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas School of Medicine. Six months after he died in 1999, she decided to return home to Ohio. She continued her work in family medicine when she completed the Midwestern University Costin Institute Fellowship with the project “The Value of a Family Practice Residency.”

It seems Dr. Urse has taken the advice she gives to students: “You have to find the work that makes you as happy at the end of the day as you were when you walked into work that morning.”