Megan Bright | SUITE 101
Dr. Scantlebury, Kidney Transplant Surgeon - Christin Etheredge
Dr. Velma P. Scantlebury was born in Barbados, West Indies. In the late 1960s, when Scantlebury was in her late teens, her parents moved the family to New York City because they wanted better opportunities for their children.
In 1989, Velma P. Scantlebury, M.D., became the first Black woman in the field of transplantation surgery. Dr. Scantlebury is currently the Associate Director of Kidney Transplant Program at Christiana Care Health System in Delaware.
Throughout her exceptional career, she has performed more than 200 living donor transplants and more than 500 deceased donor kidney transplants in children and adults, according to USA Medicine.
In 1989, Velma P. Scantlebury, M.D., became the first Black woman in the field of transplantation surgery. Dr. Scantlebury is currently the Associate Director of Kidney Transplant Program at Christiana Care Health System in Delaware.
Throughout her exceptional career, she has performed more than 200 living donor transplants and more than 500 deceased donor kidney transplants in children and adults, according to USA Medicine.
Educational Background
Dr. Scantlebury earned her Bachelor of Science in Biology degree from Long Island University. She received her medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed her internship and residency at Harlem Hospital Center in New York. She served as a clinical fellow in transplant surgery at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1989, she became an assistant professor and later an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
In 2002, Dr. Scantlebury was recruited from the University of Pittsburgh, one of the top transplant centers in the world, to the University of South Alabama. While at the University of South Alabama, Dr. Scantlebury was appointed professor of surgery and director of the University of South Alabama's Gulf Coast Regional Transplant Center.
Empowering the African-American Community
Dr. Scantlebury has served as assistant dean for community education. "My passion is to educate the African-American community and to empower dialysis patients with the knowledge and understanding that they too can have a better life through the gift of transplantation," Dr. Scantlebury tells EBONY Magazine in the March 2006 article titled, "Velma P. Scantlebury, M.D."
Dr. Scantlebury is an active educator in the field of African-American organ donation, and has served on the board for the American Society of Minority Health and Transplant Professionals and as a spokesperson for Linkages to Life, an organization that encourages African-Americans to become organ donors.
EBONY Magazine states that Dr. Scatlebury has joined forces with other Black transplant surgeons around the country to end the organ donation shortage in the Black community. She states that the mission of her and other Black transplant surgeons is to "dispel myths about donation in the Black community."
According to Taunya English in her article titled, "Organ donation advocates reach out to African-Americans," Dr. Scantlebury further states that a mistrust of doctors and hospitals exists in the collective consciousness of African-Americans. That distrust, Scantlebury says, is an understandable legacy of decades of unequal access to health care and especially the injustice of the Tuskegee experiment that denied widely available treatment to hundreds of black men.
Dr. Scantlebury works with Black churches and other Black transplant surgeons to reassure African-Americans that there are legal and ethical measures in place now to protect patients and potential donors.
Meeting Dr. Velma P. Scantlebury
I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Scantlebury in 2006 at an African Methodist Episcopal Church event where her husband, Dr. Harvey L.White, was a guest speaker.
I am relieved to say that Dr. Scantlebury was quite encouraging and supportive as I briefly shared my journey about my difficult and necessary decision to end my aspirations to become a doctor and instead, with divine guidance, pursue the a field I have a passion and natural talent for, educating children.
Thankfully, an amazingly successful and exceptional genius of Dr. Scantlebury's caliber still believes in inspiring those who are just beginning their own journey, as well taking the time to speak to young people, whose lifelong dreams are still in the process of being realized and born.
Dr. Scantlebury is hopeful that other women will follow in her footsteps. In USA Medicine, "Making the Cut: Female surgeons add dimension to a field historically dominated by men," she states that "I always said I’d give myself another 10 years to help train two or three more female African-American surgeons and then I’d retire,” she says jokingly. “So far, I’ve got one.”
References:
"Women in Medicine: A League of Their Own," USA Medicine, (2) 2005: 24.
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