Michael Toppe

Background

About Michael Toppe

I have two main threads in my career to this point. Healthcare is my occupation, and for 20 years I have worked as a Physician Assistant (PA), practicing in primary care, and also as faculty in PA education for 10 years. The second thread is an engagement in health and development programs in low and middle income countries. This started in when I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, and has continued with work in the Gambia and South Africa as a Medical Officer, coordinating a Community Health Worker (CHW) program in Nigeria, and partnering with South Africa to educate PA students in clinical settings. My academic interests are the result of my 20 year journey practicing and teaching primary care and public health. Working with primary care patients revealed that so much of what affects many patients was really rooted in the social determinants of health (SDOH): it is not random that the same patterns of diagnoses and types of patients arrive in clinic. But consideration of the SDOH prompts questions of how society and values developed in the first place, which redirects us to the big questions of the design and purpose of humanity and God's plan for our lives.