Konstantinos Demertzis went into family medicine because he is interested in the human as much as the patient. In his more than 20 years of practice, his commitment to the whole person hasn’t changed, even as the country he lives and works in has.
Demertzis became a faculty member at OhioHealth and the assistant program director for the family medicine residency program at Dublin Methodist Hospital in August 2022.
“I'm looking to solve everyday problems of people so definitely it’s the human part of the profession that makes me go to work every day,” Demertzis says.
His journey to Dublin with his family began across the Atlantic on a small, middle-class island in Greece called Samos. Demertzis was born and raised on Samos, met his wife,Despina, there and practiced medicine there before moving to the United States in 2016.
He attended medical school in Ancona, Italy, after which he served as a military physician during a year of mandatory military service. He completed a residency in family medicine at the General Hospital of Samos.
Before leaving for the U.S., Demertzis worked in private practice and for the National Health System of Greece as a family doctor in the Regional Medical Center of Chora and Community Health Clinic of Karlovasi for five years.
Both of his wife’s parents are from Samos, and the family ended up in Dublin because that’s where his in-laws live now. Despina was born in Canton and raised mostly in Dublin.
While it was a tricky move professionally for Demertzis, it was the best move for the couple and their three children to leave Greece and move close to family in the U.S.
As a foreign medical graduate, Demertzis had to complete another residency through the U.S. system, which he did at Dublin Methodist Hospital. Before taking that on, he spent a year with the OhioHealth Physicians Group Quality Department.
“The experience is an interesting one because you have to change your mindset,” he says. “In the sense of when you're in training the first time, you’re a newbie and you need to learn a lot of things. And when you go again through the same process, you have a background and you have to find a way to continue being a learner in terms of stepping down from what you were, be humble and grow again. Regain trust with people. And it’s a very interesting process for sure and difficult, because you kind of need to step back as a person a bit and be patient to regain what you had before.”
Before accepting his current position, Demertzis completed a quality and safety fellowship at Riverside Methodist Hospital.
He says his multicultural background is an advantage to his medical practice. When he encounters patients who are immigrants and may not speak English well, he says he knows exactly what they’re going through and puts in the extra effort to ensure they understand the care they’re receiving.
“Already having the experience to come from another country, or to have an experience like I did my med school in another country, in a different language makes me be very understanding and tolerant of the difficulty of that kind of encounter,” Demertzis says. “Because you have to understand one of the most difficult encounters that we have is when there’s a language barrier.”
That same process of being understanding, patient and interested in the person also helps him see the larger context of what his patients are dealing with and how that affects them.
“Understanding that many of the problems that we’re dealing (with) in the office has nothing to do with diseases, (but) sometimes has to do with socioeconomic problems,” he says. “And this is a very important part of being a doctor and understanding and taking care of the person instead of just a patient.”
As the assistant program director of the family medicine residency program, Demertzis says the way they practice is slightly different because most of the physicians there are in training. Although it may take more time to get in and out of the appointment due to the training process, Demetzis says they are thorough.
“I can assure you there are so many layers of taking care of the patient there,” he says. “And that is expected because we are a training facility and that is something that in my eyes, if I was a patient, maybe we deal with annoying waiting before, but I would want to have it at the level of how many eyes look at me every time that I'm going there.”
Claire Miller is an editor at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at cmiller@cityscenemediagroup.com.
