Starting over again

Merilyn Potters

Monday, July 8, 1996 | 6:15 a.m.

While passionately involved in a third career, Bernard Feldman has also found the time to retire.

He plays golf behind his ultra-modern home at the Las Vegas Country Club, has just returned from a few days at the Utah Shakespearean Festival and, whenever possible, visits with his out-of-town grandchildren.

As the vice-chairman for the University School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics, he's also coordinating the school's first pediatric residency program.

Retirement is relative.

"This time, I'm working only half-time -- 40 hours a week -- as opposed to 80 hours a week before," Feldman says.

Long hours were the norm during his 18-year stint as director of the neonatal intensive care unit at Sunrise Children's Hospital.

"I retired in December of '94 and four days later got the job here at the medical school."

At 62, Feldman doesn't miss the extreme physical and emotional demands of caring for very sick babies. But he still has his challenges.

"This is a whole new career for me. I never did any of this before. Now I have to change my thinking to be a doctor who knows all of pediatrics and be able to teach residents.

"I'm in academic medicine now and have responsibilities to the public, the students and the medical school."

To round out his retirement, Feldman is also serving as president of the Clark County Medical Society -- a forum for him to espouse the virtues of organized medicine.

"Our mission is to protect physician and patient relationships. We are patient advocates.

"When the federal government looks at (health care) policies, it looks to the well-known medical organizations.

"If physicians don't have a seat at the table, they can't have any influence, and they can't complain how they are being treated by external forces."

While these activities define retirement for Feldman, they're also new steps on a career path that has spanned more than 35 years.

He began practicing pediatrics at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Pensacola, Fla. And for nearly 10 years after that, he was the pediatrician at Mid Hudson Medical Group in Fishkill, N.Y.

Not yet 40, Feldman wanted to do more than practice small-town general pediatrics.

Is this what I am going to do for the rest of my life?

"The ordinary, everyday office pediatrics was not challenging enough. I saw more of a challenge in other aspects of medicine."

So he and his wife, Elaine, and their three children came west, where he got a master's degree in public health from University of California at Berkeley and then did a fellowship in neonatal and perinatal medicine at University of California, San Diego.

In 1974, he came to Las Vegas as part of the initial group of doctors -- trainees along with Dr. Louis Gluck, their mentor -- that started the neonatal program at Sunrise. In 1976, he became the unit's first director.

When J. Parker Kurlinski, who is now the director, came to the unit in 1977, also as a fellow from UC San Diego, the two began a friendship of mutual reliance.

"It was a situation whereby I was dealing with a person who had years of invaluable experience, and he relied on my recent scientific training," Kurlinski says.

"It was certainly less of a father-son relationship and more of an older brother-younger brother relationship -- a nice family. It worked out very well for the babies."

Feldman isn't modest about how far he, Kurlinski and the other pioneers in the program have brought the unit.

In 1974, the infant mortality rate in the state was 14 per every 1,000 births, one of the highest in the nation. Today, it's among the nation's lowest at less than five per every 1,000 births.

"The neonatal unit at Sunrise that Bernie supervised during (those years) is the biggest single factor to improving the survival rate of our underweight newborns," says Dr. Otto Ravenholt, chief health officer of the Clark County Health District.

Labor of love

Feldman's interest in neonatology was born when he left general pediatrics in 1973 for his master's degree in public health.

"My thinking was that more could be accomplished with children by looking at populations of children and preventive medicine."

Concerns about teenage pregnancy, low-birth-weight babies, neonatal mortality and infant mortality led him to the country's new sub-specialty. Only 409 neonatologists had been certified before him.

But his interest in public health never fell by the wayside, as evidenced by his governor-appointed seat as chairman of the Nevada State Board of Health.

He endorses immunization programs, required seat belt and motorcycle helmet use, and prevention programs for tobacco cessation, blood-pressure control and nutrition.

As for his concern about low-birth-weight babies, he insists that prenatal care is necessary.

"We can detect early labor. If (a new mother) is under care, labor can be stopped to allow her to have a term baby. If she's not under the physician's care, then early labor won't be detected.

"But what the doctor can do in addition to telling patients not to smoke or drink we don't know."

Beyond prenatal care, the community must offer better sex education for teens, Feldman says. Many young people are ignorant about reproduction, pregnancy and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.

"It's not just abstinence and contraception that must be taught. It's how do you say no to sex.

"How do you develop enough of your own self-esteem to say to your date, 'I don't want sex or sex without contraception.'"

The State Board of Health will be supporting legislation next year encompassing preventive medicine and public health issues such as these, Feldman promises.

Making pediatricians

Meantime, his attentions are on the pediatric residency program. He recently submitted a voluminous application for accreditation, which details schedules, faculty and training locations.

In September, the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education, which consists of representatives from national medical organizations such as the American Medical Association, will visit the medical school to authenticate the application.

In late October, Feldman expects approval to start the program.

The medical school already offers residencies in family practice, internal medicine, obstetrics, surgery and psychiatry. Once accredited, pediatrics will be the sixth.

But it will be the first residency that will be jointly sponsored by both UMC and Columbia Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center.

"The combination effort will make for a better training program," he says.

"The trainee will get exposed to medicine practiced in both a community hospital and a county hospital."

Pediatric residents also will be taught at doctors' offices, emergency rooms, public health clinics and at a new medical school building at Cheyenne Avenue and Tenaya Way that will break ground in October.

Feldman reiterates that the medical school is statewide -- not exclusively domiciled in Northern Nevada.

"It's one school, with two campuses -- one in the north and one in the south. Down here is where the clinical training of students and residents occurs.

"There are 52 students a year becoming doctors in Nevada, and we suffer under a lack of identity. Now we will have a building that will be the mainstay of the Las Vegas campus of the University School of Medicine."

Support system

Fortified with conversation of the medical school, neonatology and public health, Feldman sinks into a purple leather sofa -- the centerpiece of his home's second-story great room -- Elaine by his side.

Behind them is a million-dollar view of a rolling golf course backdropped by the Las Vegas Hilton. And beyond that, to the south, are the newest Strip hotels.

They built their chrome-and-glass, winding-stairwell home four years ago, carpeted the floors with plush purple and kept the walls white as a backdrop for huge oils and graceful, massive sculpture.

Lending antithesis to the decorator-showcase air, clusters of family photos sit on a small table.

Getting to this luxury spot was hard work, Elaine recalls.

During the years her husband was in general pediatric practice working long hours and weekends, she was a full-time mom.

"I told our children 'Your daddy's taking care of sick kids,'" she says. "You have to be positive about it."

What started out as a high-school romance has become a 40-year partnership.

"Without Elaine going back to work, I couldn't have changed my career to neonatology," Feldman says.

"People get stuck in positions where income considerations prevent them from going on and on."

For Elaine, it's par for the course.

"If you're not going to be behind him and supportive of what he's doing, there's no point in staying together.

"Certainly a lot of medical marriages don't make it because people don't know what they are getting into and don't want to stick it out."

When they came to Nevada, she went to work for Valley Bank and then came home at night and helped out with his paperwork. Eventually she went to work in his office full time.

"I wanted to feel a part of it. I can't feel left out. You support and participate."

Her husband says he'd do it all again. And who knows, he just might. For now, however, retirement is good.

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