William “Bill” Ventres, MD, MA, assistant professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine in the College of Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), was recently invested as the holder of the Ben Saltzman, MD, Distinguished Chair in Rural Family Medicine.
Ventres, who joined UAMS in 2017, is a family physician and medical anthropologist with more than 30 years of clinical experience working with disadvantaged patients. He is known as a leader in developing family medicine internationally, researching doctor-patient communication using qualitative methods, and studying the social history of family medicine in the United States. He plans to encourage students and residents to practice in rural and underserved areas in Arkansas to improve health outcomes.
“It is a great honor to receive the Saltzman Chair, with its emphasis on rural and underserved family medicine,” said Ventres. “When I was in medical school and residency, I saw that lots of patients felt left out. Sometimes they were poor or uneducated, sometimes it was because of where they lived, and sometimes it was because of the color of their skin or the language they spoke. I didn’t see that medicine was doing a very good job helping these people, so I found my small niche in working to try and change things in this area.”
An endowed chair is among the highest academic honors a university can bestow on a faculty member. A distinguished chair is a $1.5 million endowment established to support the educational, research, and clinical activities of the chair holder who will lead future innovations in medicine and healthcare. Those named to a chair are among the most highly regarded scientists, physicians, and professors in their fields.
“The choice of Dr. Ventres to assume this chair is a very wise decision, and that’s because of his passion for the very highest quality of medicine and for his passion for taking care of his fellow man, which he has demonstrated throughout a long career and all parts of the world,” said Christopher T. Westfall, MD, dean of the College of Medicine. “I am absolutely convinced that he is the right holder for this chair.”
The chair is named in honor of Ben Saltzman, MD, who has been called the father of rural family medicine in Arkansas. Saltzman joined UAMS in 1974 as the first professor and chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine. During his seven-year tenure, he served as director of rural medicine development and the flexible internship program. In 1981, he was appointed director of the Arkansas Department of Health and served until his retirement in 1987. Saltzman died in 2003.
Saltzman built the first hospital in Mountain Home and helped establish others across the state. He is remembered as a champion of rural health and an international leader in helping eradicate polio. Saltzman made healthcare more widely available and worked as a traveling doctor who owned a twin-engine plane for his work.
“The work of improving the health of all Arkansans, wherever they may be, is not the task of one person – it is a responsibility we all share,” Ventres said. “And we are all enriched by the labor we invest to fulfill it.”
Ventres received a medical degree from the University of Minnesota Medical School and completed a residency and fellowship training in family medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson. He has received two Core Fulbright U.S. Scholar awards and has taught family medicine residents at the National Experimental University of Táchira in San Cristobal, Venezuela, and public health students at the University of El Salvador in San Salvador. Prior to his arrival at UAMS, he was a research associate for five years in the Institute for Studies in History, Anthropology and Archeology at the University of El Salvador.
Ventres has served as visiting professor at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and scholar-in-residence at both the Brocher Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.