Paul Szmal: Good morning, it's 8.38, it's FLX Morning Tuesday, and you might want to stay away from UR Medicine and Finger Lakes health people today, because they seem to be having a real rash of bad luck. Kimberly Alok was ill, so she can't be with us today. Her backup, Caroline Scott, was going to come in. She had a last second thing come up, so she can't be here. So we have Mary Sue Dean, star of the Rotary Club PSA and fundraising guru. Good morning. And we'll meet our provider in just a moment. I know that you want to turn most of the time over to her, but you have a couple of things. First of all, the Rock for Kidney fundraiser. Remind us what that was for, and how it came out.
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Good morning, Ted. Yep, I'm batting clean up here, but delighted to be here.
Mary Sue Dean: Sure. Michael Rossetti, who, shout out to him for putting this together, was a fundraiser for the Dialysis Center at Geneva General Hospital, January 11th, Saturday, a cold night, and we had, I think there were like 250 people at the Sons and Daughters of Italy in Geneva, who came out to support the Dialysis Center, raised about $3,500 for the Dialysis Center. It was a wonderful community event. Mike and his band, 10th Avenue Acoustic, played for a couple hours, and then Rockin' Boots came in for a couple hours, and had everybody dancing. We had, there were raffles, and apparently 40 pounds of ZD, I can't imagine how many gallons of marinara, and countless meatballs, and it was amazing, it was terrific. So we're really grateful to the Sons and Daughters of Italy for hosting, and to Mike for putting it all together. It really, it was, and for our dialysis patients who are sometimes, it's a challenging place to be.
Paul Szmal: Oh boy, I imagine. And so I think for, we had some patients there, our staff was there, I think it was an incredibly gratifying, it was just gratifying for everybody to see the support.
Mary Sue Dean: Well and it's just been great to see all these great facility upgrades all over the campuses, the various facilities that we've talked about in the last few years. Yeah, we had, the other nice thing that's happened is our auxiliary down at Soldiers and Sailors, they presented a check to the Foundation for $8,500. I think since COVID, it's been challenging to sort of get that back together and get those events together that can raise that kind of money. So they brought us a check for $8,500 that supports the new x-ray down at Soldiers and Sailors, and they're starting construction on that as we speak. That'll be up and running shortly, which we're obviously thrilled and delighted about too.
Paul Szmal: All right. UR Medicine Finger Lakes Health is one of the best and brightest places to work in the healthcare industry. It is nationally recognized now. We were recognized by an organization. The most gratifying thing about that is that actually it comes not just from external evaluation, but they pull the people who work at the hospitals and work at UR Medicine Finger Lakes Health. So it's internal and external recognition that we are the best and brightest place, well among the best and brightest, I should say to me, it's the best and brightest place to work, but recognized among the best and brightest places to work nationally. So we're delighted and proud and welcome. Come join us.
I don't have the date right in front of me, so I hope you do. There's a blood drive coming up at Geneva General. This month is National Blood Donor Month, and we've had between wildfires and bad winter weather and multiple hurricanes hitting at the same time, a lot of drives don't get held and the need goes up, and that's a tough equation. It's also challenging in the winter simply because people are ill, so they're not on their regular rotation of giving. January 24th at the hospital, we're having our regular blood drive. You can sign up at the Red Cross Blood Drive website. Please give if you can. RedCrossBlood.org, find drives all over the area.
So we're going to talk family medicine today. Let's meet our provider. You want to introduce her?
Mary Sue Dean: Sure. I'd love for her to introduce herself.
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Okay. Good morning. I'm Dr. Jennifer Mungeri. I work at Geneva Primary Care, and I work at CliftonSprings Internal Medicine.
Paul Szmal: So let's talk about family medicine because a lot of healthcare in the U.S., we probably have more specialists than anybody in the world. So what led you to good old-fashioned basic family doctoring?
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: I actually started off as a specialist. I started off as a surgeon, and I was frustrated as a surgeon, even though surgery is really cool to do. It's very gratifying. If there's a problem, you remove that problem, and you're done, and that's exciting. But you don't get a lot of long-term with any of those patients. You don't get to see how they do with time. You don't get to see them grow. Family medicine is very cool because you can take care of entire families. So you can see little kids. You can see adults. You can see older folks. You can take care of pregnant women, things like that. So depending on the scope of your individual practice, you can do just about total life care. And you get to see little kids, and you get to see them grow up. And so you get that institutional knowledge and that background. It's like if I take my car to somebody who's never seen it before, they might do a good job. But if I take it to somebody who knows its history and knows what might have happened before, they're going to be able to use that knowledge, just like you can, of the individual patient. So you can build relationships over time. It's awkward to share some of the medical things that we have to share with our doctors with people that you don't feel comfortable talking to. And the pressures of modern-day medicine, we don't get to spend all the time with patients that we would like to if we got to make our own schedules. But through having a longer-term relationship with your primary care doctor, you get to know each other pretty well. We've been through the same history together. And so I think it results in better care in the long run.
Paul Szmal: And I always like to talk about this when I have primary care physicians in, and that's building that relationship, or what's known as bedside manner, because I imagine they must try to teach you a little bit of that in school. But really, it's something that I think you have to develop out of your own personality, right?
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Yeah. I think you have to be comfortable enough with yourself that you're comfortable enough talking with other people. People get very embarrassed talking about medical things a lot of the times, and there's no shame. You're not going to tell me anything I haven't seen, and I'm certainly not going to judge. So please tell us what you're worried about. Lots of times, we can do something to help.
Paul Szmal: And how do you get patients to ask questions? Because the typical thing is, you know, the doctor tells you 800 different things, and this dosage and that dosage, and do this and do that. Any questions? And they go, no.
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Well, we have a pretty robust patient portal where I always encourage people, you know, if you think of anything after the visit, because I just threw a lot of information at you, send me a message, call, you know, leave us a message. We'll get back to you. We'll answer your questions. I would much rather people get answers than stay at home and worry. And even if it's something that seems like a silly question, I am happy to answer all of them. If you read something on the internet and you don't know if it's true, I am absolutely 100% willing to have a conversation about that with you. And if we have to bring you in for another appointment to talk about it, we will. I don't want to make too many car analogies here, but same thing as you do maintenance in your car, you want to see your primary care doctor, not just when you're sick. And that's one of the reasons we're here today is talk about the importance of getting routine screenings and just making sure that you're keeping on top of your health and not just coming in when you're sick.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, there's a lot of preventative maintenance that you do. You know, your car runs better if you get your oil changed and your tires rotated and all those checkups by mileage. It's the same thing for the human body. We do certain screenings and checkups by age, certain testing. Our whole point is to play the long game for you guys. So a lot of diseases that affect us, especially when we're older, have kind of their starting pieces when you're younger. And most of the things that lead to big bad disease down the road don't have symptoms when they first show up. So unless we're actively looking for it, you're not going to be able to tell us something's wrong.
I always like to get advice for myself here in these segments because I've got the best people to get it from. So I'm 65, just turned 65 years old. What kinds of things should I be thinking about with my primary care physician?
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Well, depending on age and your family history, there's lots of stuff that we talk about. We do a lot of different types of cancer screening. So the main one is colon cancer screening for anybody over 45. Colon cancer is super preventable if we catch it early, but you're not going to have symptoms in those early days. So it's very important that we look for it. And so that's why we screen everybody starting at age 45. Sooner if you have a family history of someone that's had colon cancer at a younger age, we'd start looking at you even sooner because you'd be a high risk person. Screening for colon cancer is a colonoscopy or there are some noninvasive options if for some reason you couldn't have a colonoscopy, but it's really not a terrible test to have. You get some very nice happy drugs and you sleep through most of it. So that's not a bad day. But super effective, diagnostic and therapeutic at the same time. So if we do find something during a colonoscopy, a lot of times we can fix it in that same colonoscopy. So we found it, we took care of it, and now we know exactly what we need to look out for in the future. We do routine screening for cervical cancer for women, breast cancer for women starting at age 40. We start doing mammograms. And then if people are smokers, we screen regularly for lung cancer. And that depends on your age, how much you've smoked, if you're still smoking, if you quit. There's some kind of finer details there that your doctor can go over with you.
Paul Szmal: So let's talk about your team a little bit. I've heard you're on one of our radio ads that people hear and I know you have Ashley Pike who is a nurse practitioner and you also have physician's assistants. So talk about that support team that helps you out.
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: We have two nurse practitioners, well three nurse practitioners actually at both my offices. So we have Ashley Pike and Jennifer Bell at Geneva and we have Kelly Bowen at the Clifton office. There will be a physician's assistant that will be joining us later this year in the Geneva location. We have a couple other physicians that work with us and we're planning to expand that group as well. So we're growing.
Paul Szmal: Well, I was going to say, you talked about the two facilities that you work at, but there's also several other family offices within Finger Lakes Health.
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Oh, there's a whole slew of other offices. We've got offices in Seneca Falls, we've got Life Care, we have offices in Penn-Yan, all over. Whole area is covered.
Paul Szmal: A lot of our conversations here have been how various disciplines have changed. Has primary physician practice changed less because it's kind of basic or is it undergoing a lot of evolution as well?
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Medicine in general is changing. We know more than we used to. There's more testing that's available. Insurance coverage has changed, unfortunately, and there's more regulations that we need to cover. So there's hoops that we need to jump through. We're always trying to stay on top of new medication developments, but balance that with cost and insurance coverage and all of that. It's never boring.
Paul Szmal: We've had the growth of urgent care practices over the last few years. Our people, sometimes, are they using those instead of primary care? Instead of having their basic maintenance, like we talked about, just waiting until they're sick, we're on to urgent care.
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Yeah, urgent care will take care of an acute problem. So just like an acute visit at your primary care doctor, we do those too. But if for some reason you can't get in and you need to be seen today, then urgent care is a fantastic option if you're sick, if you're injured, things like that. But they don't do the long-term preventative stuff that your primary care doc would do for you.
Paul Szmal: All right. Well, appreciate what you do, and we appreciate you sharing this with us again, and Mary Sue's waving at me. What do you have to say?
Mary Sue Dean: I just want to say, speaking of urgent care, we are opening the new Urgent Care in Penn Yan next month.
Paul Szmal: Oh!
Mary Sue Dean: So that's really exciting. It's Soldiers and Sailors. We're very excited about that, and so that aligns nicely. But it's the right backup, I think, is what urgent care is.
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Absolutely. Unfortunately, we don't have enough primary care physicians in the world to take care of the patient population that we have to take care of, so we need help. And so urgent care is one of the best supports we have for those acute things that pop up that are time-dependent.
Paul Szmal: All right. Mary Sue, we have a couple minutes left, so if you want to talk fundraising or anything like that, go ahead.
Mary Sue Dean: No, I was going to say, if you want to schedule an appointment with Dr. McGarry or any of her team in either Geneva or Clifton Springs, the Geneva office number is 315-787-5400, and the Clifton Springs office is 315-462-7001, so I just want to make sure that that is out there.
Paul Szmal: All right. And we're taking new patients at both locations.
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Yeah.
Paul Szmal: Okay. So please do. And you're also going to talk a little bit about vaccines, because we're in the middle, of course, of flu. It is the middle of vaccine season, so yeah, we definitely talk about flu and COVID. COVID has become kind of more seasonal, and so it's going to end up being like flu, where you're probably going to need a different COVID booster every year, just like you get a different flu shot every year. Also very important for folks to stay up to date on their pneumonia vaccines. That's changed recently, so even if previously you thought you were up to date, it's worth checking with your primary care doctor to make sure those recommendations haven't shifted for you. And then RSV, so that's respiratory syncytial virus, that is something that we now have a vaccine available for older folks, recommended for everybody age 75 and older, or 60 to 74 if you have risk factors for prolonged illness.
Paul Szmal: All right. Good reminder. Dr. Jennifer Mungeri, thanks so much. We appreciate your time.
Jennifer Mungari, Mary Sue Dean: Thank you.
Paul Szmal: Mary Sue, thank you for pinch hitting. Stay warm.
Mary Sue Dean: Thanks, Ted.
Paul Szmal: We will say hello to Kimberly and Carolyn and tell them to try to stay out of trouble next time. And we'll get healthy again with that fine meat with UR Medicine and Finger Lakes Health in two weeks. It's 852.
