Tiffani Maycock, D.O., M.S., F.A.A.F.P.Tiffani Maycock, D.O., M.S. F.A.A.F.P., associate professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and director of the Selma Family Medicine Residency Program, sat on
a six-member panel of women 2022 Dean’s Excellence Award winners. The American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA)’s chapter at the Heersink School of Medicine hosted this panel in August 2022 as the second part of a two-part series featuring almost all the women who won this award.
Maycock, who won a 2022 Dean’s Excellence Award in Service, spoke about her many accomplishments at UAB since her arrival at Selma in 2017.
Selma hospital Vaughan Regional Medical Center has most of its inpatients under the care of Maycock and her residents, Louis Lambiase, M.D., regional dean of the UAB Montgomery Regional Medical Campus, noted in his remarks. Lambiase nominated Maycock for the Dean’s Excellence Award.
The hospital’s CEO also had high praise for Maycock. “The CEO of Vaughan Regional Medical Center also commented that his hospital would fold without our program, and it’s probably true,” Maycock said, and chuckled. “We take care of the vast majority of the inpatients in the hospital.”
COVID-19 was also a tremendous challenge for Maycock and her team, with the challenges of the pandemic, some faculty turnover and an increase in patient load, stressing an already stressed system.
“At the peak of the pandemic, it wasn’t uncommon for us to see 50, 60, almost 70 hospitalized patients a day,” Maycock noted. “It was unreal.”
To make sure all the patients received care, Maycock supervised residents in the hospital, clinic, three nursing homes and on home visits. Maycock also established UAB Selma’s hospitalist fellowship program and an ICU elective to help meet the needs. Even with this help, however, Maycock said she racked up almost quadruple “the annual average work RVU production for family physicians during the 2020 - 2021 year.”
Another one of Maycock’s responsibilities is bringing new residents into the UAB Selma Family Medicine residency, one of the country's few truly rural residency programs.
“Rural hospitalists are very rare,” Maycock said. “[Hospitalists are] not used to having to manage the type of patients that we have to manage here. They’re not used to having to do the type of procedures that we have to do here.” Still, the program currently has 16 residents, all now immersed in the opportunities and challenges of rural practice.
In addition, Maycock said that 11 residents who finished the Selma residency program under Maycock work in Alabama or Selma currently. This fact is significant for Alabama, as the state faces a critical shortage of primary care providers.
Outside of the hospital, Maycock also loves serving the community through initiatives like health fairs. Maycock has worked hard to improve Selma’s free clinic offerings and to connect the program to Selma through creating a “community chair resident leadership position” as well.
Maycock (fourth from left) celebrates Graduate Medical Education Professionals Day.Maycock said the advice she gives to medical students and residents is that life can be unpredictable, so they should never pass up learning new things “This is a time for you to gather as many tools as you can because you don’t know where life is going to lead you,” Maycock remarked.
Maycock advised others to praise God with their work as this is something she practices. “I view my work as a calling, and I work for the glory of the Caller and rather than for myself, and so that’s my motivation,” she explained. “Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”
UAB Medicine Assistant Dean of Professional Development Sandra Frazier, M.D., spoke up during the call to show her amazement at Maycock’s devotion and perseverance in Selma.
“I’m exhausted just listening to what she’s doing. I don’t know how she’s still standing,” Frazier said. “I’m so impressed because she has such a servant’s heart. She is the epitome of service. She could go anywhere, but she chooses to stay in Selma, which is a very difficult place to provide healthcare and to recruit people, and she keeps soldiering on.”
In addition to Maycock, Cristin Gavin, Ph.D., Megan Hayes, Ph.D., Kelly Hyndman, Ph.D., Nita Limdi, Pharm.D., Ph.D., MSPH, and Teresa Wilborn, Pharm.D., Ph.D., also shared their accomplishments working in the medical field at UAB. All were Dean’s Excellence Award Winners in 2022.
AMWA chapter president and panel leader Marisa Marques, M.D., said a goal of this event was to hear how each woman won their awards, have them discuss their excellent work and normalize those kinds of conversations.
“More than 70% of the award winners were women,” Dr. Marques said. ‘I thought that was an important milestone.”
To view the entire discussion and watch the first part of the series, click here.