Faculty Spotlight: Katie Brite, MD

“This is about collaboration, not competition.”

Katie Brite, MD, was speaking of the collaboration that exists between the physicians, nurses and other health care specialists that provide crucial patient care. Dr. Brite is a family physician and the medical director of the Wesley Community and Health Center, a clinic that provides care to roughly 59 zip codes in the Phoenix area.

Pathway to Medicine

Dr. Brite dreamed of being a high school math teacher. “Everybody in my family was in education,” she said. “I started to fall in love with my science classes, so I changed my major to chemistry. I realized by observation that a good doctor is also a good teacher.”

Dr. Brite started working at Wesley when she was a medical student at The University of Arizona in Tucson in 2003. “The clinic was much smaller then, with only three exam rooms,” she said. Wesley has since received government funding to become a federally qualified health center and saw 20,500 patients in 2013. The clinic has grown to include 10 exam rooms and offers procedural services as well as mental health counseling, social work services and obstetrics and gynecology.

Primary Care Shortage

“We have such a shortage of primary care, we need everyone. Everyone brings something to the table,” Dr. Brite said of her chosen specialty. “Everybody can learn from each other. They have different skills and different knowledge-bases.”

A variety of students from different disciplines spend time at Wesley, including Arizona State University and UA nursing students, as well as social work students. Dr. Brite, in her role at the College of Medicine – Phoenix as the family, community and preventive medicine clerkship director, said she tries her best to convince students to see the beauty of primary care.

“It’s an area of huge need,” she said. “Students get to train at this premier teaching institution. Our patients here are diverse and some are pretty sick, so the students learn a lot.”

Inspiring Others

Dr. Brite recalled a memory that reinforced her passion for medicine. “Four years ago around Christmas time, we had a patient come in who could not even afford her medication,” she said. “She had children and couldn’t buy them Christmas gifts. “I had a Target gift card. I didn’t need it, so I gave it to the patient. There was an interpreter in the room with me who decided to go into medicine after seeing that. She’s now a third-year student at the College of Medicine – Phoenix.

“That’s a moment I’ll always remember.”

Advice and Mentorship

“I tell all of the students to embrace every experience even if it’s not something they necessarily want to do,” Dr. Brite said of her mentorship approach at Wesley. “Look at it as, ‘I’ll never get to do something like this again.’ Identify your knowledge gaps and go after them.”