Karen Jubanyik-Barber, MD

Karen Jubanyik, MD, is an emergency medicine physician with special expertise in women’s health, geriatrics, intimate partner violence, palliative care, and hospice medicine.

“Emergency Medicine allows me to try to establish connections with patients and families quickly, and address urgent and emergent issues,” Dr. Jubanyik says.

Patient education has always been one of her top priorities. “As the only medical person in my family, I have always been the person assigned to deal with medical providers, so it has always felt natural for me to educate patients and families about their medical conditions,” she says. “I know that even very smart people can benefit from a translation of the very specific medical language that medical providers have developed to communicate with each other.”

As a clinician, Dr. Jubanyik makes a point of always remembering that her patients are having a very bad day—sometimes the worst day of their and their families' lives. “My approach is to look at the patient from a holistic perspective and assess their immediate and long-term needs through the lens of their strengths and challenges,” she says.

She also encourages everyone, including the patient’s caregivers and other members of the health care team, to attend to their own self-care and wellness, she says.

An associate professor emergency medicine at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Jubanyik serves on the Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) Ethics Committee and teaches a semester-long bioethics course to first-year Yale medical students. She is a member of the YNHH Peer Support Committee, helping to offer support to co-workers who are struggling due to ethical issues, burnout, and overwhelming situations related to patient care. She heads up initiatives to support geriatric patients throughout Yale New Haven Health system, which includes acute-care hospitals and other sites stretching from Westchester County, New York, to Westerly, Rhode Island.