PC Profile: Neena Desai Ghose OPC ’95

It was only a middle school service project, but it may have turned Neena Desai Ghose OPC ’95 toward a lifelong career in the caring professions. 

Ghose, now an assistant professor of family and preventive medicine at the Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, remembers the impact more than the details. She was in seventh grade, and former PC teacher Fred LaMotte, who taught religious studies, took students to Trevor’s Place, a shelter for homeless families in North Philadelphia. As young as she was, Ghose did some tutoring and reading to the small children there.

“I think that was my first service experience,” Ghose recalls today. “And when I think about my trajectory into healthcare and social justice work, I credit a lot of that exposure to Penn Charter, and especially to Fred.” LaMotte also took Ghose to a conference on healthcare and homelessness held at Germantown Academy during her middle school years.

Those were hardly the only formative experiences for Ghose during her 13 years as a PC lifer. She edited The Mirror, played tennis and excelled academically. “There was nothing I wasn’t involved in,” she laughs now. “The volume and diversity of things you were able to engage in at Penn Charter was kind of unbelievable.”

From PC, Ghose went to the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in anthropology. She next earned a master’s degree in public health at Johns Hopkins before attending medical school at Jefferson Medical College, choosing family medicine as her specialty. After five years practicing family medicine, Ghose joined the Emory faculty in 2018.

She now has a clinic where she sees patients but also teaches medical students and family medicine residents. The residents go through rotations in different subfields, including hospital medicine, geriatrics, obstetrics, women’s health, contraceptive care and sports medicine. A lifestyle clinic helps with issues such as nutrition, weight loss and behavioral change.

The qualities that make a good family physician go beyond technical knowledge. “You have to meet the patients where they are,” Ghose explains. “You have to combine an evidence-based approach to patient care with a patient-centered focus, listening to their concerns and personal health goals. You have to hear what they want and find some reasonable middle ground. You have to be pretty good at what I call empathetic listening.” 

In sum, family medicine is “a little bit of everything,” Ghose says. “It’s always dynamic.” 

The challenges, though, are only growing bigger. According to a 2024 report by the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, there will be a shortage of more than 87,000 primary care doctors in the United States by 2037, with shortages greatest in rural areas. Many family physicians report feeling burned out. 

Compared to previous generations, people today are less likely to see a family physician, someone they have gotten to know and who is familiar with their medical history. Instead, they are more likely to seek treatment from urgent care centers, walk-in clinics at pharmacy chains, and telemedicine appointments. 

“I think people are prioritizing access,” Ghose reasons. “They’re trying to have better access to care, maybe at the expense of quality care from a known healthcare provider.” 

Although the demand for family medicine is increasing, public support for it is under attack, which worries her greatly. Ghose’s department at Emory is facing a 30% budget cut, which negatively impacts programs aimed at women, children and families, as well as other vulnerable populations. “All of that is on the chopping block,” she says. 

Decades after that middle school service project, Ghose’s commitment to service work remains strong. For the last several years, she has worked to provide healthcare clinics for migrant farmworkers in southern Georgia. Ghose has taken her students and residents into small, rural communities that often do not have family medicine practices of their own. The farm workers receive needed treatment and learn about preventive care for problems such as diabetes. The residents learn how to take patient histories and gain experience communicating with people they may not see regularly in urban settings. Those programs, too, are scheduled for big cuts in the fall. 

“A lot of that funding will be gone,” Ghose says. “We can look for outside funding, but it doesn’t always happen, which adversely impacts our most vulnerable.” 

– Mark Bernstein OPC '79