Posted April 28, 2015

 

Brittany Hout, PA-C Article Published in Thrive Magazine (a publication of The Asheboro Courier-Tribune)

 

Asheboro’s Hout PA-C Returns Home to Practice After College, Navy
By Josh Rasmussen
Randolph Health PR Coordinator

As the saying goes, if you love something, set it free. Randolph County set Brittany Hout, PA-C, free and after college, graduate school and a three-year commitment to the Navy, she’s come home.

Lieutenant Hout, technically still in the Navy serving in the nonactive reserves for the remaining five years of her eight-year contract, see patients at Randolph Medical Associates in Randleman. She was born and raised in Asheboro and graduated from Southwestern Randolph High School. Hout is married with two kids and said family and friends drew her back.

“Asheboro is a great community to raise children in,” she said. “It’s really been great coming back and plugging into the community.”

After graduating high school, Hout started her journey toward health care, something she said she’s known was in her future since she was four years old and visited Randolph Hospital for stitches after her dog bit her.

Meredith College was the first stop. East Carolina was her choice for graduate school and because she attended school for three years on the Navy’s dime through the HPSP (Health Professions Scholarship Program), she had to repay three years, which she did in Virginia.

Hout worked as PA at one of the half dozen or so base clinics at JEB (Joint Expeditionary Base) Little Creek in Virginia Beach, home of the East Coast SEAL(s). After separating from the Navy and entering the nonactive reserves, Hout said she had to make some adjustments to return to civilian life, both personally and with regard to medicine. She said hearing people call her by her first name was strange at first, but now hearing ma’am and Lt. Hout bugs her.

On the medical front, Hout boasted about the communication and her ability to focus simply on the medicine. She said civilian medicine can get confusing with many different versions of electronic medical records and several complicated insurance scenarios which aren’t present in the Navy.

There to help welcome her to civilian medicine was a 71-year-old man named Charles Sands who has severe COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and came in as an emergency case.

“We don’t get those too often,” Hout said. “He was in the procedure room. They’d put him on the bed. He was pretty much bluish-gray. His oxygen was so low he was gasping for air and his eyes were glazed over.”

Hout began doing what she could to treat him while they waited for the ambulance to pick him up and take him to Randolph Hospital. Sands said he gave her the half pack of cigarettes he had in his pocket along with permission to throw them away, then left in the ambulance. She visited him at Randolph Hospital later in the day.

Sands has now been a patient of Hout’s for about five months and said she’s special.

“The way she treats me,” he said. “The way she takes care of me. She cares. She wants to help, and I know she does the same for every patient she has.”

Like Hout, Sands, who had been living in South Carolina, returned to Randolph County where he lives with his daughter.

“A key to health care is getting the family involved,” Hout said, “We have just as good of a relationship with his daughter and we do with him.”

That support also helped when Sands quit smoking, something with which Hout has unique experience. She was a tobacco cessation champion in the military. Hout used her experience with tobacco cessation as another avenue to get plugged back into the Randolph County community. She has already signed up as one of the trainers for a tobacco cessation program being offered in Randolph County, called QuitSmart.

“People really want to quit,” Hout said. “They just don’t know how or have the resources.”

She said while quitting, a person misses more than just the nicotine.

“You have a physical withdrawal, but also emotional withdrawal and then the actual habit withdrawal. People feel like they’ve lost a really good friend,” she said.

Hout said she likes how QuitSmart is set up because it addresses all three components.

To learn more about QuitSmart or schedule an appointment with Hout, call 336-495-3186.