A VA Physician describes his “Calling”

VA Careers regularly profiles employees in an effort to show job seekers a different side of VA from their perspectives. The goal is to recruit top health care talent by sharing the stories of dedicated professionals who make a difference in the lives of Veterans every day.

Josh is a VA employee who emphasizes that his personal decision to dedicate his career to Veterans is the best decision he has ever made. This is the first of three parts of Josh’s story.

Merriam-Webster defines a “calling” as a strong inner impulse toward a course of action, conviction, vocation or profession.

Dr. Josh, a Physician at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, went into medicine to help people, and he describes his decision to work at VA as his calling to give back to Veterans.

To Dr. Josh, VA stands for something bigger than any individual – it’s more than just a health care system to him. His calling is to uphold the charter that VA promises its Veterans of quality health care.

“Every day that I am involved in improving the way we deliver care to Veterans, I feel like a million bucks,” he says.

When asked a favorite interviewer’s question “Would you prefer to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond?”, Dr. Josh replied simply that he’d rather be a small fish working to help develop a school of fish. That belief in a team-oriented approach to patient care is what makes him such a great fit at VA, and a strong proponent of the PACT initiative.

The VA Patient Aligned Care Team (PACT) initiative assures that each Veteran will work together with a team of health care professionals to plan for their whole-person care and life-long health and wellness goals.

This is a concept Dr. Josh heartily agrees with. “It’s not about any one individual health care provider, it’s about how we work together. The question should be how do we together deliver better patient care as a team and in that sense, there is no place I would rather work.”

Check back tomorrow to read more of Dr. Josh’s story and his insight on his specialty and his motivation to grow within VA.