By Joyce DeWallace, Contributing Writer
Northborough – Dr. Sara Shields is all too modest about her many accomplishments.
“Just don's call me Super Woman,” she said. “I get a lot of help from a lot of people. No one does anything in isolation. My team and my colleagues at work support me. At home, I have help. I also have friends and neighbors and a husband who understands. Without them, I couldn's do what I do.”
What exactly does Shields do? For starters, she devotes much of her time to maternity care and women's health for underserved high-risk populations as a family physician at the Family Medicine and Community Health Center on Queen Street in Worcester. She is also a clinical associate professor of family medicine and community health for the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She also recently co-authored a medical textbook with co-worker Dr. Lucy Candib. She speaks Spanish well enough to have taught a course in the language. And in 2011, Shields was formally recognized for exceptional achievement with the 2011 Chair's Awards for Excellence.
The latter awards recognize extraordinary accomplishments by department faculty who have enhanced their specialty, community and school with contributions including new and innovative training and fellowship programs, research initiatives and clinical innovations. The awards were instituted at UMass Medical School several years ago, by Daniel Lasser, M.D., chair and professor of family medicine & community health.
Shields was cited for providing dedicated leadership over many years to maternity services at the Family Health Center, including development of the Centering Pregnancy Model, which provides interdisciplinary group visits for infants and pregnant women and for her commitment over many years to training in Advanced Life Support in Obstetrics (ALSO), a collaboration with the family medicine residency programs at Boston University, Brown University and the University of Connecticut; the textbook she co-authored; and for her participation in the Worcester Area Infant Mortality Task Force, which she now co-chairs.
Her work for the last 17 years has been the focus of her busy life. As a family physician specializing in women's health, Shields has developed a different style of prenatal care for her expectant patients. Eight to 12 women who are due within a span of six weeks meet together for a two-hour session, starting at about 16 weeks. Then the women attend 10 more group visits. In the first half hour, the women weigh themselves, take their blood pressure and interact with each other. In the group meetings, the physicians go over the typical prenatal issues. Each woman also has private time with the physician. This allows the expectant mothers to develop a support group of peers, and works better to minimize problems.
“My goal is to empower these women to be their own advocates for health care,” Shields said. “What's fun for me is that several women continue with visits for almost a year after delivery.”
About eight years ago, colleague Dr. Lucy Candib suggested that she and Shields write a book about these patient-centered care services. This appealed to the former English major, who also wrote for her high school newspaper and was co-editor of her medical school newspaper. Working with 30 colleagues from around the country, the two Worcester physicians produced the medical textbook “Women Centered Care in Pregnancy and Childbirth,” which was published in January of 2010.
Shields lives in Northborough with her husband, Bruce Fishbein, who is an engineer in the high tech field, and their two children. Their daughter, Maggie Shields, a senior at Algonquin Regional High School, traveled with her mother to Haiti in November of 2011 to work in a medical missionary clinic for five days. Son, Daniel Fishbein, is a freshman at Algonquin. The whole family went to Ecuador for two months in 2006 to improve their Spanish.
In her online biography, Shields writes about her family: “My family loves pursuing New England's multi-season activities with kids (hiking, biking, camping, anything at Cape Cod, skiing and snowshoeing); in my nanoseconds of free time I enjoy reading novels, writing, knitting and sometimes coaching kids’ soccer or teaching Sunday School.”