Veronica Swan DeGraff has just turned 25 and is not yet a doctor, but she’s said to have already made a “remarkable contribution to healthcare in Bermuda”.
That description came from Abigail Clifford, the chief executive of B&FM, the health insurance firm [now called Allshores] that awarded Ms Swan DeGraff its 2025 Postgraduate John Wight Scholarship for $20,000.
Listening to the medical student explain her “clear passion for public health” it’s easy to see why she would have garnered such praise.
“I feel like I’ve done a lot of public health work,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of community work.
“I was a candy striper, a BHB volunteer, I worked for a daily mental health clinic, I was a lab technician during Covid.
“All of my work, for all of my 25 years, it feels like has been committed to the community.”
That ethos is now informing a research project she has embarked on while pursuing her four-year Doctor of Medicine degree at St George’s University in Grenada.
Ms Swan DeGraff is heading a diabetes study which is intended to improve public health outcomes in Grenada, Trinidad and Bermuda.
She explained: “The inspiration for the research … is that a lot of the research that we have on diabetes is from the American Heart Association or American stuff like that.
“I want to create an opportunity to get research and data on Caribbean persons.”
Tackling a public health crisis
She and two fellow students have created a diabetes healthcare pamphlet, aimed both at raising awareness and surveying the level of knowledge in the community about the killer disease.
Ms Swan DeGraff has seen the difficulty many Grenadians have in accessing medical care and the first focus group for the study will be on the Caribbean island.
“However, once we get Grenada off, settled in and in rotation, we want to branch out to Bermuda and Trinidad,” she said.
According to the Ministry of Health, more than 13 per cent of Bermuda’s population has been diagnosed with diabetes, making it a public health crisis.
Ms Swan DeGraff said Bermudians had access to excellent information about diabetes, especially compared to other islands, so she has looked for “holes” in terms of awareness to tailor the project to local needs.
“I found some holes that I want to fill in regard to education on diabetes,” she said.
She and her classmates are seeking funding for the scheme.
“We’re applying for two grants currently, because all those pamphlets have to be printed and then we have to afford the database to get it done.
“We want to do printed pamphlets because we understand that there’s a certain population that still is in love with paper and things in their hands, so we want to cater to them, and then the rest of it will be digital.”
High hopes
The project has been time consuming, but she has managed to juggle it with her medical studies.
“Even though I’ve been working on this diabetes project for maybe two years now, I’m going to be finishing school in like five years, so the research is going to grow with me as well.
“There’s no rush and there’s no timeline, because as soon as we get the data, we’re going to be able to do … the peer reviewed articles, which take years upon years to actually finish.”
She added: “I’m hoping that once I finish residency and I’m a doctor in Bermuda in the next five or six years, that my research is done.”
Ms Swan DeGraff, who has already achieved a bachelor’s degree with honours in biomedical sciences from AdventHealth University in Florida, recently moved to London to do a year of clinical work in hospitals affiliated with St George’s University.
She said she chose the Grenada school as it was where her mentor, Danielle Simons, of Island Health Services, trained to be a doctor, as well as Kyjuan Brown, of Northshore Medical Centre.
Like them, Ms Swan DeGraff, a cofounder of Bermuda Youth Connect, plans to return home to practise medicine.
The former Gilbert Institute and Bermuda Institute pupil wants to become an emergency room doctor at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital and has already had the chance to work summers there as an intern, getting hands-on ER experience.
Having previously thought she would become a radiologist, her time at KEMH crystallised her love of emergency medical care. She said: “Where better to serve the public in hospital than in emergency care.”
Ms Swan DeGraff laughed as she said of Chikezie Dean Okereke, the Chief of Emergency at Bermuda Hospitals Board: “I would love to have his job one day and I told him, too!”
She has benefited from a BHB scholarship, as well as financial awards for her graduate studies from the Bermuda Public Services Union, the Further Education Award from the Government and the Fessenden-Trott Scholarship from Butterfield Bank.
The scholarships have made all the difference in enabling her to pursue her dream career.
“It’s reassuring that people are seeing me as worthy of a scholarship,” she said. “I’m committed to my community and it’s nice to see that they want to give back to me in that way.”
