William I. Mariencheck Jr.
I joined Wake Forest back in 2019. I came to Wake Forest after 19 years of work in a large physician owned private practice, multi-specialty group out of a large hospital in western Tennessee. The journey since then has brought me into learning with the fellows, the other faculty here. Also, a journey of learning administratively how to manage in my role in administration, a very complex, very large entity that now is trying to immerse itself in an even larger entity of Atrium Health, really spanning Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois, Wisconsin. We have learners at all stages and all levels from medical students to residents, to fellows, to APPs, to nurses, to therapists of every discipline, to ourselves, our colleagues. We hold each other accountable. We challenge each other. We ask each other hard questions, trying to figure out how to best do things. And to be honest with you, being in that sort of culture has been the most rewarding thing I've had in this part of my career.
Clinically, I'm involved really in the whole spectrum of pulmonary and critical care practice. I have roles in the intensive care units here at the mothership of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist. We have a couple of ICUs that are house staff driven with attending supervision. We also have intensive care units that are advanced practice provider driven with faculty supervision. I also practice in an ICU at one of our satellite hospitals south of here in Lexington, which is an APP model in a community hospital. We do consultative inpatient services at both of those facilities, and I also participate in the spectrum of pulmonary procedures at both facilities from plural procedures to bronchoscopic procedures and ICU procedures.
In addition to inpatient kind of traditional pulmonary critical care responsibilities, I have my own general pulmonary outpatient practice where I just see the spectrum of outpatient pulmonary problems. Teaching fellows is probably the most rewarding and probably a very challenging part of the job because you want to push yourself to help folks figure out how to be the doctor they want to become, but I think that the program at Wake Forest offers a path to success for a wide variety of desires in this regard. Speaking from a physician who is, again, in a very large private practice hospital for 19 years, extreme clinical competency is a very important goal to have, and I think I can confidently say the fellows who come out of our program are extraordinarily competent day one of their new job from a clinical, procedural, administrative and professional interaction standpoint. Clinical competency should be the foundation of any training program.
But in addition to that, our fellows have interests in administrative paths, in investigative paths, in academic pathways, and here at Wake, there are faculty mentors within the pulmonary and critical care section, within the internal medicine department, and within the institution as a whole, who can provide guidance and leadership and help and growth in all of those areas. So if those are very important to you, I think you should ask questions about that and get actively engaged from day one in working a path to success in that regard.
