Among her priorities are improving access, broadening psychiatric care
By Julie Halm
Physician Dori Marshall took over the role of chief medical officer at Oishei Children’s Hospital in late August. She came to the position armed with plenty of experience, empathy and a love for the community that she is now serving.
Marshall moved to the Buffalo area as a small child and considers herself a Buffalonian through and through. Her academic and work history would certainly reflect that fact, having received her bachelor’s degree from the University at Buffalo and her medical degree from the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo where she also completed her residency in psychiatry.
Among many other roles that she has held, she is an associate professor of psychiatry at UB’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences where she has, and will continue to, mentor first- and second-year medical students.
While her new position at Oishei Children’s Hospital will have her overseeing the medical affairs of the hospital and its pediatric and women’s ambulatory clinicals, she said she plans to bring her wealth of psychiatric knowledge and passion for the field to the table to help better serve the residents of this area.
“What continues to draw me to the field of psychiatry, more than any other field, is you really get to know people in their entirety,” she said. “People will tell you their story in a way they’ve never told anybody else.”
Marshall said that when you have that story, providers are better able to understand the ways their patients interpret and interact with the world in a way that can truly inform their care. She has no shortage of seeing this dynamic play out, either, as Marshall spent more than a decade with teenagers needing acute inpatient hospitalization.
She noted that her time working with adolescents is an experience which she will bring with her in this new role in order to develop pediatric mental health care through the hospital, something which she said is needed now more than ever before.
“Post-pandemic I think everybody knows that children’s mental health needs focusing on,” she said, adding that she has been glad to see commitment to that idea from officials at the state and county levels. “To have that commitment from the state and the county to this hospital to really improve access and develop improved mental health care for children in this area is so important and that’s a very important piece of it for me.”
In her tenure in this new position, she said that one of her primary goals is to improve access to health care for the women and children both in the city of Buffalo and the communities beyond its borders.
“There’re so many opportunities to expand access and reach women in the city of Buffalo and in rural areas through telemedicine and other means and I think there’s just very exciting opportunities to really impact the health of women and children in Western New York,” she said.
While those are some of her large and long-term goals, as she settles into her new role, Marshall said that her first focus is to keep learning the networks within the hospital and continue building relationships with those at Oishei Children’s Hospital and across Kaleida Health.
While she has plenty of work ahead of her at Oishei Children’s Hospital, there are some things that will not be changing for Marshall, including that she plans to continue to mentor medical students both because she finds it to be a fulfilling endeavor, but also because it helps work toward a greater good.
“Medical school is really tough. The first two years, in many ways, I think are the hardest and students do need encouragement,” she said. “It also gives me the opportunity to see who’s interested in OB-GYN and pediatrics and how we can encourage them to stay here in Western New York.”
Staying in the area has certainly afforded Marshall the opportunity to achieve some impressive strides in her professional career, but along with her new, and arguably most impressive title to date, comes a deep sense of gratitude on her part for the opportunities it affords her to help improve access to services she feels are so deeply needed in her hometown.
“It’s just so important and it’s not everyone in their career who gets the opportunity or finds the platform to speak to the issues that are dearest to their heart,” she said.