06/09/2026
Alumni Spotlight:
✨Michelle Yates✨
Today, I serve as the pediatric department head at Soddo Christian Hospital in Southern Ethiopia. At VCMC, I completed the Greenwald OB Fellowship and was expecting to step into the role of providing quality care for women. Unfortunately, the pediatrician working at the hospital moved away and I was asked to help cover the pediatric department. I saw that caring for the mother, without appropriate care for high risk neonates, was inadequate. As a result, I helped to start a NICU over 10 years ago and that has grown and expanded services to include the care of preterm neonates down to 26 weeks EGA with our smallest living preterm baby born at 630g. Also seeing the significant prevalence of rheumatic heart disease and watching children, and adults die of preventable heart disease, I helped to start a school based rheumatic heart disease screening program, which has screened over 70,000 school aged children to start them on secondary prophylaxis to prevent the severe complications of rheumatic heart disease. My work spans direct patient care, teaching, program development, and health system strengthening, with a focus on improving access to specialized services for some of the most vulnerable patients.
VCMC’s full-spectrum family medicine training laid the foundation for everything I do today. The program taught me to care for patients across the continuum of life—from premature newborns to older adults—and to approach complex medical challenges with confidence, adaptability, and compassion. The breadth of clinical training, strong procedural experience, and commitment to serving underserved communities prepared me to practice in resource-limited settings, be flexible to meet the needs of the community around me and to help build new programs where they are needed most.
