There were hardly enough supplies to care for the patients who arrived at the Maforki Ebola treatment center in Sierra Leone. Health-care workers wore layers of impermeable gear to protect themselves from the virus. Only half of the patients would survive.
“The virus was spreading so quickly in this part of Sierra Leone, in Port Loko,” said 31-year-old Nick Stahlschmidt, a physician from the St. Louis area who worked at the center in the fall of 2014. “They took a high school and converted the grounds into an Ebola treatment unit.”
Stahlschmidt is one of thousands of doctors and health workers from around the globe who flew to the West African nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to help control the largest Ebola epidemic on record. Stahlschmidt served a six-week stint in Maforki last fall with an organization called Partners in Health and hoped to stay for longer. But with $280,000 in student loan debt requiring regular payments, Stahlschmidt had to come home to a job in the States.
“I’d already signed a contract, and my student loan payments were starting in January. But this is the environment I want to be in,” said Stahlschmidt, a graduate of the Saint Louis University School of Medicine. His dream is to run a clinic in the United States and a developing country at the same time.
Currently working in the emergency room at Mercy Hospital Jefferson in Festus, Stahlschmidt entered an essay contest to have his student loans paid off by a lender called Social Finance, or SoFi. He is now one of 20 finalists, and he says winning would allow him to pursue international medical work more regularly and for longer stints at a time.
Among the other competitors are a veteran who founded a nonprofit for Afghan interpreters, a pediatric dentist in Fresno, Calif., and a lawyer who hopes to buy a home for his mother, who works as a custodian to support their family. The public voting period closes Tuesday at midnight. The winner will have all his or her student paid off; runners-up will get some help.
It’s not a coincidence that some of the finalists are in medicine. In 2013, U.S. medical students graduated with an average of $176,000 in student debt, according to the American Association of Medical Colleges.
“When everybody starts medical school, all they’ve wanted to do their whole life is to be a doctor, take care of patients,” Stahlschmidt said. “The financial reality of medical school doesn’t hit until you’re well into it.”
In Stahlschmidt’s case, the loans have been a barrier to volunteering internationally. But the same thing happens when medical students hope to practice in low-income areas or to pursue specialties like family medicine. (Stahlschmidt’s training is also in primary care).
“When you have the same debt as the cardiologist down the street, who can bill massively for the procedures he’s doing, and you’re trying to prevent those procedures from ever needing to take place by providing good primary care, it’s difficult,” Stahlschmidt said. “It influences a lot of decisions in our young doctors for what kind of health care they want to provide.”
The Ebola epidemic is not over: Since 2014, more than 3,900 people have died from the virus in Sierra Leone, and about a dozen new cases are confirmed each week, according to the most recent report from the World Health Organization. Liberia has been declared Ebola-free, but treatment centers in Guinea are still treating patients regularly.
If he wins the competition, Stahlschmidt says he will donate $10,000 to Partners in Health and CURE International, so they can prepare for the next epidemic.
To vote for Nick Stahlschmidt, visit https://soficontest.com/entry.aspx?id=18.
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