Mary Jo Deering is retiring after 27 years of public service in health. I contributed the following to a “history book” about her career so far:
When I was first starting out as a researcher, back in 2001, Mary Jo invited me to meet with her and her team at HHS. She guided me toward questions that turned out to be the bedrock on which we built the next decade of the Pew Research Center’s health portfolio. I will always be grateful for her authoritative yet gentle guidance.
The other gift I treasure is the memory of a day we spent together in Berlin. We had both been invited to a health conference there and neither of us had made plans for the time we had free, so we met at a café in a picturesque neighborhood, then walked and talked about everything except work. We happened upon a museum featuring an artist that Mary Jo had studied, so once again she guided me, making wry observations, just as she did when talking about the online health landscape.
Now that I’m more established, I try to channel Mary Jo’s spirit when I’m talking with a new colleague, inside or outside my organization. I imagine her extending a mantle of mentorship, like a cape that sweeps over everyone she meets, powerful shelter even from afar, even for just one day.
How lovely. The warmth of your human spirit, and your natural sharing of everything, come through clearly.
I know Mary Jo but I have no stories to share – it’s a great project idea!
May we all strive to deserve such a tribute upon our retirement.
I told those present at our HealthFoo session about health literacy that Mary Jo Deering was my oldest hero, since I started my journey in the world of cancer online communities in 1995. She was deeply involved in the evolution of the information made available to patients and in the Great Dissemination of scientific resources for the benefit of us all. While obviously a true expert, in the classical sense, she was determined to make much of the information help deep within professional silos, free and able to be shared among many, all of a sudden.
It was no wonder that Mary Jo and Tom Ferguson shared many ideas. Here is something that may not have been published earlier (it comes from Tom’s personal archives). In the comment I’ll just post the introduction and I’ll post the entire keynote presentation somewhere else, in the near future.
A Keynote Presentation from “Partnerships for Networked Consumer Health Information” Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services May 12,1996, Rancho Mirage, California
Introduction by conference organizer Mary Jo Deering
One of the fathers of the field of consumer health information is Tom Ferguson. He is currently a Senior Associate at the Center for Clinical Computing, Harvard Medical School. He is President ofSelf-Care Productions, a healthcare consulting firm in Austin, Texas.
I know many of you know Tom and have attended his conferences and benefited from his contributions to the field. His new book, Health Online, is a comprehensive guide to self-care resources on the online networks.
Tom founded the influential journal Medical Self-Care. He wrote a chapter on the empowered health consumer for the book that accompanied Bill Moyers’ Mind-Body Medicine series on Public Television. It’s very appropriate also, as an indication of his contributions to the field, that John Nesbitt has referred to his work as representing “the essence of the shift from institutional help to self- help.”
Fantastic! Thanks for sharing that, Gilles!
As an aside, I have a copy of Health Online on my bookshelf and was just looking at it today.
We stand on the shoulders of giants, like Tom and Mary Jo.