“Our main mission was to maintain medical readiness for the reservists,” Dr. Bartow says, adding that during this time he developed a solid understanding of occupational medicine, especially how people’s medical conditions affect their daily functional status. “Part of our weekend service was giving everyone an annual health assessment—everyone from the chief of Naval Operations to the newest recruit—and monitoring their health status.”
This summer, he spent two weeks at Parks Reserve Forces Training Area, also called Camp Parks, which is a U.S. Army facility in Dublin, Calif. The mobilization and training center is predominantly used by U.S. Army Reserve personnel in case of war or natural disaster.
“We set up a 32-bed acute care hospital,” says Dr. Bartow. “We erected the tents and set everything up from scratch to simulate what we would do in the field to support the Marine Corps. We would operate like a MASH (mobile Army surgical hospital) unit.”
For nearly eight years, Dr. Bartow has spent one weekend each month training with other doctors, corpsmen & allied health staff at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago, a five-hour drive from his home.
As it turned out, he was also the person most comfortable with handling electrical power distribution and ended up being in charge of the generators.
His civilian employer has also benefited from his military experiences. Instead of blindly testing patients for tuberculosis, especially those taking biologics, Marshfield Clinic is in the process of rolling out a military screening questionnaire to monitor patients’ risks for the disease. If positive indicators are revealed, then patients are tested.
Dr. Bartow served as a department chair of rheumatology at Marshfield, but says, “I learned more from being a leader in the military about how to function in a civilian world. I learned how to be a better, more effective team leader and facilitator by analyzing things, getting buy-in from everyone involved and making sure everyone is on board.”
He says his experiences as a rheumatologist have also proved very useful for the military, because many reservist sick calls or complaints involve musculoskeletal problems or injuries.
Off-Duty Fun
When he’s not working at Marshfield or engaged in military training, Dr. Bartow sings in the church choir and performs in community concerts twice a year. Several times a month, he and his wife also go scuba diving in local lakes. They take dive trips several times a year. They recently returned from a dive trip to Iceland and Greenland, which reinforced their preference for the warm waters of the Caribbean.
