In 1975, Gilbert Handal, MD, was working as a pediatric infectious disease physician in Miami when he was offered a job at a brand new medical school: Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) El Paso.
“I looked at the map and said, ‘My God, this is a wonderful opportunity,’” he told Texas Medicine. “‘This is a community that’s very underserved. It’s on the border. We have a chance to work with people across the border.’ … My dream has always been to try to influence in whatever way I can not only the health care of children in El Paso but also for the [other] countries.”
Fellow physicians widely agree that Dr. Handal made the most of that opportunity. At TexMed 2023 in May, Dr. Handal was one of two physicians to receive the Texas Medical Association’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award. It was just the fourth time that TMA’s Board of Councilors honored two people at once since the award was created in 1962. The other honoree was Houston emergency physician Diana Fite, MD, who as TMA president helped lead physicians through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. (See “Leading in Crisis,” page 6.)
Dr. Handal arrived at the TTUHSC El Paso campus during its early development and was the only faculty member for the pediatrics department, sleeping in the hospital while tending to 3,000 deliveries that first year with five residents. Today, the department has 35 faculty members and 15 three-year residents.
“He loves teaching and instructs his students and residents to care for each child as if it were your child,” his colleague, El Paso internist Roxanne Tyroch, MD, said in bestowing the award upon Dr. Handal at TexMed. “He reminds us all that medicine is a profession, and not just a job; his wish is that organized medicine will espouse these values and instill them in decision-makers.”
Dr. Handal also espouses an international humanitarian outlook on health care, which he says was shaped by his upbringing. Born in 1942 in what is now Israel, he witnessed religious violence against civilians as a young child and was fortunate enough to have parents who helped him understand differences among religious and ethnic groups.
“My parents were just phenomenal,” he said. “Sometimes they would spend hours talking to me about the why and the what and the when. And that forms you. It forms your background. It forms your nature – your spirit.”
After World War II, his family moved first to Europe and then to Chile, where he grew up and went to medical school before moving to Miami and then to El Paso. As part of his long-term goal to improve health for children and adults on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Dr. Handal helped create the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission, chaired its state and local regional advisory councils, and served on the TMA-affiliated Border Health Caucus.
Dr. Handal also has a keen appreciation for the power of organized medicine.
“If [medicine’s] not controlled by us, it will be controlled by somebody else,” he said.
A member of TMA’s Board of Councilors, Dr. Handal has represented his local delegation in TMA’s House of Delegates. He’s also been president of the El Paso County Medical Society (EPCMS) and led in several other TMA, EPCMS, and Texas Pediatric Society roles. They include serving on TMA’s Committee on Child and Adolescent Health and Committee on Infectious Diseases as well as being a member of the International Medical Graduate Section.
“Knowing that organized medicine is behind everything and anything we can do, that is so important,” he said.
Dr. Handal’s cross-border efforts to improve health care include:
- Creating a binational conference designed to compare and contrast how Mexico and the U.S. address children’s health;
- Launching a mobile health care initiative in five El Paso school districts to help uninsured children at nine schools each week;
- Winning a $2.5 million grant to establish a municipal health care system in Juarez, Mexico, that ultimately provided care for 93,000 families;
- Collaborating with school nurses and other health care professionals to create an El Paso County vaccination program for human papillomavirus (HPV) that produced some of the highest HPV vaccination rates in the country; and
- Chairing the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s Medical Care Advisory Committee, which reviews and makes recommendations to the state Medicaid director on proposed rules.
Dr. Handal’s international efforts have taken him well beyond the Texas-Mexico border. In 1991-92, he served as a medical officer in the U.S. Army Reserve during the first Iraq War. He speaks Arabic as well as Spanish, and most of his work focused on Iraqi prisoners of war and making sure they were treated humanely.
“It was freezing, and these guys had no shoes and no clothes,” he said. “All they asked for was some hot water and tea, and it helped make a difference in their lives. … The thankfulness and appreciation was just tremendous.”
Dr. Handal is now trying to obtain funding for a project that would allow two medical students to follow a family for three years, with multidisciplinary support. The study is designed to enhance the family’s health care as well as address social and legal issues. The project is based on work Dr. Handal has done himself in which he identified needed services that, once obtained, improved families’ health.
This type of research is important to avoid doing “piecemeal work” and instead take a comprehensive look at patients, he says.
“In this country … what we need is a more all-encompassing approach to health care, not only as a curative or even preventative process but in all aspects that will determine a healthy family,” he said.