ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — URMC and staff at Golisano Children’s Hospital are mourning the loss of their former Chair of Pediatrics.
Dr. Patrick Brophy passed away last weekend. Brophy was chair of the department of Pediatrics at GCH and physician-in-chief for five years. He left early in 2023 to serve as the head of Child Health and Pediatrics for the province of Saskatchewan.
A post on Golisano Children’s Hospital’s “X” account read “…the GCH community was blessed by Dr. Brophy’s warm and generous spirit, as well as his passion for helping children.”
Dr. Brophy was featured on Adam Interviews back in 2018.
Read the transcript of Dr. Brophy’s 2018 conversation with Adam Chodak below
Adam: How did you come to know of Rochester?
Dr. Brophy: When I was a resident in training there was a disease called Haemophilus influenzae b meningitis and it was devastating and it killed so many kids and left so many kids with horrible morbidity. During the second year of my residency this vaccine came out and it essentially eradicated the disease and you know when you’re in the middle of seeing kids die from this and it stops and you go, how did this happen, why did that happen? And it happened because the vaccine was developed here (in Rochester) by one of former chairs of the department of pediatrics.
Adam: What will be one of your top priorities?
Dr. Brophy: Part of our mission and mandate is to address some of the socioeconomic components of child health and so we can’t forget that’s one of our core missions. At the end of the day, it’s really all about the kids … I would love to see a health center in Downtown Rochester is one of our most needed areas with a good opportunity for people to address the socioeconomic issues that we have.
Adam: You have stressed the importance of telemedicine to improve child medical care in rural communities.
Dr. Brophy: We should be able to improve access (through telemedicine), not just to our general pediatrics groups, but also our specialty groups.
Adam: You’ve also stressed the need to label gun violence as a public health issue.
Dr. Brophy: I’m very much supportive of the 2nd Amendment, I come from a hunting background, I think it’s respectful, understanding safety to keep guns away from kids who shouldn’t have them.
Adam: How do you handle the emotion of this job?
Dr. Brophy: The good times are amazingly good, the bad times are really tough, you see kids that have this potential and it’s really stolen from them, so how do you do that without being emotive and I think the day you lose emotional care and compassion to those kids and those families is the day you should probably hang it up. That never really goes away. There’s still families I keep in touch with who lost their kids and often they’re the ones who help shore you up as you go through this process.
