For years, Cristine Maloney has been fielding two questions from her Randolph neighbors. “Are you done (your medical training) yet?” and “When are you coming to Gifford?”
After completing pre-med and doctor of medicine programs at the University of Vermont, her residency through Yale and a one-year palliative medicine fellowship at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, she finally has the answer for which community members were hoping.
She’s done her extensive training and Dr. Maloney is now seeing patients as an outpatient internal medicine physician at Gifford Medical Center in Randolph.
A Bristol, VT, native, she took an indirect path to medicine.
She studied sociology as an undergrad at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and went on to work for AmeriCorps VISTA, a national service program designed to fight poverty. Maloney’s work focused on housing. She worked for Rockingham Community Action in Portsmouth, N.H., and then in 1996 came to Randolph to work for the Randolph Area Community Development Corporation (then called the Randolph Community Development Corporation).
She spent a year at RACDC through AmeriCorps and then five years as the community development organization’s housing director, helping in part to create housing for those in need.
At the same time she was working nights and weekends as an emergency medical technician for White River Valley Ambulance in Bethel. Her sister is a paramedic and got her interested in becoming an EMT. From that, Maloney’s interest in medicine grew.
“I really loved the housing work. I did,” she says, but “I was intrigued by medicine.”
“I might want to try something in medicine” was the thought that struck her. Being an EMT, meant reacting to crises. Maloney wanted to do more. She wanted to counsel people, learn more about them, understand their circumstances, build relationships and help over the long-term. She wanted to be a doctor.
She went back to school – continuing to work while doing evening and intensive summer pre-medical classes at UVM and then attending medical school full-time. Her three-year internal medicine residency through the Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut was at 367-bed Waterbury Hospital and 1,000-bed Yale-New Haven Hospital.
From her residency program, she could have gone directly to work, but a newer specialty – palliative medicine – appealed to Dr. Maloney. Dr. Maloney had lost two people – a friend and a cousin – in their 20s, including one who died of stomach cancer. And as an EMT, when others might have shied away, she thrived at comforting families after the loss of a loved one.
“There are ways that this (the end-of-life) can go really well and there are ways that it can be much better, and how that goes is something that families remember. If it goes really poorly, it weighs on them for a long period of time,” Dr. Maloney says.
With an interest in helping families achieve positive experiences, Dr. Maloney joined the palliative care fellowship program at Dartmouth. She was just the third person to complete the program and expects to take her palliative care certification exam the next time it is offered, which will be in 2012.
She would be the third physician at Gifford with the special board certification, and it was the hospital’s emphasis on end-of-life care that in part attracted Dr. Maloney to Gifford. “I was very intrigued with what they were doing in palliative care,” she says of her new employer. “It was a fit.”
Also among Dr. Maloney’s interests are hospice care, geriatrics, preventative care, women’s care and relationship building. It’s her goal to form a bond with patients and their families that lasts over decades of care.
She joins physicians Drs. David Pattison, Milt Fowler and James Currie and nurse practitioner Mary LaBrecque in providing internal medicine, or adult, care in Randolph. Dr. Maloney is accepting new patients. Call her at Gifford at (802) 728-2428.