Rummana Aslam, MD Appointed Assistant Professor

Rummana Aslam, MD, joined the Yale School of Medicine Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation as an assistant professor on April 1.

Aslam, a physiatrist, says she didn’t follow a tradition path into her specialty, but was driven by the desire to help people feel better from as young as she can remember. “I had this moment when I was a little girl where I remember someone being in pain and I thought to myself that this must be the worst thing that anyone can go through,” Aslam says. “it may sound a little cheesy, but that was the moment for me. I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want people to be in pain. That is the most horrible thing anyone has to go through, so I want to be a doctor.’”

Aslam, who specializes in wound care and management, now serves as medical director of Lawrence + Memorial Hospital’s Wound Center in New London, which oversees all of the hospital’s wound care operations. Working at Yale provides her the opportunity to combine her passion with the latest approaches in medicine to benefit her patients, she says.

“I take care of the whole patient,” Aslam says. “I really get to help manage them into a system so that their wounds can heal. I get to take ownership for their entire situation. You aren’t just seeing a patient for a one-and-done visit. You’re meeting with them multiple times and in some cases for an extended period. You’re sharing part of your life with them and that is what I enjoy the most.”

As a physiatrist, Aslam says she was inspired by her early training in critical care to help patients get up and moving again following traumatic injuries. Some of the patients could barely move, but once they were given the proper exercises and movements to follow, they recovered. “That was my first realization that there has to be quality of life after the critical illness. So we save their lives, but we need to think about what will happen to them afterwards, how well they are going to be,” she says. “Rehabilitation is a critical good component of after being acutely ill. It's important that you get patients back to normally functionality if possible.”

She began her medical education in her native Pakistan, where she attended Rawalpindi Medical College at the University of Punjab. She later completed a variety of internships, residencies and fellowships including surgical residency and clinical fellowship in surgical critical care, research fellowship in wound care, before she changed her path to become a physiatrist. Prior to joining Yale, she worked as an associate professor at Seton Hall- Hackensack-Meridian School of Medicine.

Aslam said she found the wound management work particularly rewarding after completing a research fellowship in wound healing in Wound Healing Laboratory at the University of California. “I completed another residency at that point and became a physiatrist. It’s the path that made the most sense to me as a patient with complex wound is disabled,” she says.

She approaches her patients with the mentality of a critical care physician combined with the knowledge of a surgeon from her time in residency, she says. Understanding how her colleagues across medicine approach their fields helps her to find the best path for her patients, she says. Persistent wounds are often a sign of other troubles a patient may be experiencing, whether it be complications from renal disease or diabetes.

“I’m fortunate to get to work with patients who have just been through a major life-changing event,” Aslam says. “I feel like I can help them regain control of their individual situations after a challenging event and that’s very rewarding to me.”

When she’s not in the clinic, Aslam enjoys spending as much time with her family and friends as she can.