‘Pillar of the community.’ How this Miami-area pediatrician is keeping kids healthy

“Can you go ‘Ahhh’?”

“Noooo,” Dillon Burkhalter said, shaking his head while lying on the exam table inside Dr. Tina Carroll-Scott’s clinic in South Miami.

“OK, we’ll do that last,” the doctor said, moving on to his ears.

The 21-month old toddler is here for a check-up and to get a routine childhood immunization. As Carroll-Scott examines him, she talks to his mom about how many words he’s learned so far, and also asks about a second baby on the way.

Dillon’s mom, 42-year-old Chemika Burkhalter, first met Carroll-Scott while working for the Early Learning Coalition.

“She was like a pediatrician and a social worker, somebody that just went beyond whatever it is that needed to be done,” Burkhalter said. “So when I got pregnant, I was like, ‘I’m not going to anybody else but Dr. Scott’ because of what I know of her.”

Originally from Rochester, New York, the doctor has cared for children in the South Miami area for more than a decade at the South Miami Children’s Clinic, where she serves as medical director. The clinic, 6701 SW 58th Pl., accepts uninsured and insured children and is registered as a 501 nonprofit. The clinic is supported by philanthropists Jim and Susan Carr, and South Miami Hospital, Baptist Health South Florida and the city of South Miami.

In 2007, when the clinic opened, Carroll-Scott learned that many of her uninsured patients, predominantly from Black and Hispanic families, could qualify for Medicaid or other programs, but their parents didn’t know. She helped families learn about their options.

She also realized that in order to care for her patients, she had to learn more about what was going on in their lives. Some families are living with food insecurity or struggling to find affordable housing and have had to move out of the neighborhood, she said. One family has lived in a motel since August.

“If they were worrying about all of these other things, just staying alive, and surviving day to day, they weren’t going to be able to concentrate on the health,” said the 56-year-old doctor.

The doctor helps connect families to resources and organizations in South Florida. She accepts clothing and shoe donations at her clinic for families in need. She began offering telehealth to patients before COVID to make access to care easier and help parents avoid the cost of urgent care and emergency room visits. She also used the telehealth app during the pandemic to give updates on COVID and vaccines. And she had led COVID vaccination pop-ups at her clinic for children and underserved communities, eventually partnering with the county to get shots into arms.

In 2015, she partnered with Florida International University’s Green Family Foundation Neighborhood Health Education Learning Program, run by the university’s medical school. The program provides medical care to 77 families in South Miami through mobile health centers and home visits to improve access to care in underserved communities. One of the mobile health centers is parked in front of Carroll-Scott’s clinic, which often refers families to the program. She said the program is caring for 800 households in underserved communities across Miami-Dade.

Carroll-Scott “is a well-respected pillar of the community” and is “an outstanding advocate for community health, focusing on uninsured and underserved children in South Miami. She goes above and beyond in advocacy for her patients and families,” said Dr. David Brown, who leads the Green Family Foundation Neighborhood Health Education Learning Program (NeighborhoodHELP), in an emailed statement.

Carroll-Scott’s passion to help others, and her goal to educate patients and improve their health literacy, goes back to her own childhood.

‘Lead a healthier lifestyle’

The doctor remembers sticking her head out the car window while growing up in upstate New York, including during the winters, to avoid inhaling her dad’s cigarette smoke.

One day, she heard U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop on TV, talking about how smoking could increase a person’s risk for cancer. Carroll-Scott, who was in elementary school at the time, was in awe.

“The knowledge that he had and the way he was trying to talk to the American people and get them to lead a healthier lifestyle, I think that was probably my first experience where I decided that I wanted to do something similar and to become a physician,” said Carroll-Scott, who also loved the 1970s TV show “Marcus Welby, M.D..”

While in high school, she watched her father undergo treatment for throat cancer. On his last day of treatment, she remembers coming home to find her dad, who had stopped smoking for a year, with a cigarette once again in his hand.

“It was at that moment I realized addiction is real and even though he had been given a second chance with his life, it was such a strong pull with the cigarette smoking, he ended up not only going back to smoking, but smoking twice as much as he did before,” she said. Her dad died in his early 60s from complications after surgery for lung cancer.

After completing her undergraduate at Princeton University, she went to Boston University for medical school. She began her residency at the University of Chicago Hospitals, and completed her last year of residency at Miami Children’s Hospital (now known as Nicklaus Children’s) after moving to South Florida in 1994 with her husband. They eventually moved to Stuart, and she worked in Fort Pierce caring for farmworker families, children of mostly Haitian descent who were HIV positive, as well as a large Medicaid population.

A call from Wayne Brackin, the former CEO of South Miami Hospital who is now CEO of Kidz Medical Services, with a job offer — to be medical director of a new children’s clinic — brought her to South Miami.

What’s next?

For the pediatrician and mother of three, addressing mental health and misinformation about vaccines are some of the challenges doctors face in South Florida.

She said her partnership with FIU expanded after she saw a rise in children with depression, anxiety, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts during the COVID pandemic.

Now her patients are screened for mental health disorders, with referrals made to FIU to schedule a telehealth visit with a psychiatrist specializing in children. She’s looking for ways to provide additional mental health support to her patients, and is also battling with vaccine misinformation that has spread far beyond the COVID-19 vaccine.

“The level of misinformation that was put out there, it’s made it really difficult for pediatricians, physicians in general when it comes to trying to educate even with just regular childhood vaccinations,” she said. “We’ve always had a certain percentage of anti-vaccine sentiment but I think it’s on another level now that I have not seen in my 27-plus years of practice.”

Her goal, she said, is to make a difference in the community. She knows it takes time. And sometimes, what patients need isn’t medication.

“You have to be in tune with what the patient needs in that moment,” she said, and sometimes, instead of medication, what they need is “holding their hand, saying, ‘Hey, I’m here. Do you need a hug? I’m listening.”

“At my core, I am a caretaker. So whether it’s with my family or with my patients, that’s what I do. And, yes, I’m not gonna say it’s easy. I am definitely burned out. But giving giving back is at the core of who I am. That’s how I’ve been my entire life, whether it’s with my friends, my patients, my family.”

How to contact the clinic

South Miami Children’s Clinic

Address: 6701 SW 58th Pl., South Miami

Hours: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday; noon to 7 p.m. Wednesday; Saturday and Sunday by appointment only.

Phone: 305-662-5988

Website: the-southmiamichildrensclinic.org