Gayle Thomas, M.D.
Piedmont Health has a number of outstanding medical & dental providers that will be featured in this and upcoming newsletters. We are happy to have Dr. Gayle Thomas as our first featured physician that works in Piedmont Health’s Carrboro Community Health Center.
For someone who ended up in North Carolina almost by accident, Dr. Gayle Thomas is pretty well rooted in the Tar Heel state. A family practice physician, Thomas has worked at Piedmont Health’s Carrboro Community Health Center more than 20 years with only a brief interruption. Her husband Jim Thomas is Director of Measure Evaluation at the UNC School of Public Health.
She has two kids at Triangle schools – Ian at N.C. State and Jordan at Duke. Thomas is active in her church, Emmaus Way, and active in local charities.
And Thomas cares deeply about her patients at the Carrboro Community Health Center.
“My patients have additional barriers to health care – lack of insurance, language barriers, cultural barriers,” she said. “Working here, I have to be more attentive to these barriers and help patients figure out how to get around them.”
Thomas tries to not only take care of patients’ health needs but also to help give her young patients an educational boost. She was instrumental in starting Piedmont Health Services’ Reach out and Read program, something she knew about f
rom a stint spent at a community health center in Napa, Calif. Through this program, physicians give age-appropriate books to children during office visits and not only encourage the kids to enjoy books more but to encourage parents read to their kids as well.
“We need to use these doctor visits to help kids close the educational gap,” she said. “When we do that we’re not only going to teach the kids that books are enjoyable and interesting, but we’re going to help parents to create an environment that fosters literacy.”
Ultimately, the program is health-related, Thomas said; reading affects a family’s education level, which in turn positively affects income, which leads to improvements in health.
The nationwide program includes training for doctors in how to use books more effectively – knowledge that doctors can pass on to parents.
Each Reach Out and Read chapter must raise its own funds. The Strowd-Roses Foundation has helped support the Carrboro chapter for the past 10 years, Thomas said. “We are very proud of their support to Carrboro.” Each of Piedmont Health’s community health centers is an approved site that must obtain their own funds to provide Reach Out and Read books to their young patients.
All of this community attachment seems an unlikely outcome for someone who has traveled the path the Thomas has traveled. The daughter of missionaries, the 53-year-old physician was born in the Congo (then called Zaire). She received her undergraduate and medical education in California, graduating as one of the top six medical students in her class from the medical school at the University of California at Los Angeles. She came to North Carolina in 1989 – following her husband, who got a job at UNC.
But she hardly saw North Carolina as the end of her journey. “North Carolina was supposed to be temporary,” she explained. “We were supposed to be on our way back to Africa.”
Infused with the missionary zeal of her parents, Thomas planned to move back to the continent where she was born to take up her parents’ cause. But those plans never quite worked out. After a one year sabbatical in California, Thomas returned to the Tar Heel state in 1998 to settle down – at least, to the extent that someone like her does settle down. She and her husband regularly travel to Africa as part of Africa Rising, a group that fosters American interaction with African social entrepreneurs.
All this and she somehow finds time to run regularly (she runs half marathons), maintain medical privileges at UNC where she cares for newborn babies of community health center patients, and paint in watercolor.
She has a simple explanation for how she manages to accomplish so much: “By the grace of God.”