UAB Synopsis, Vol. 27, No. 14, April 14, 2008
William C. Bailey, MD, recently stepped down as UAB Lung Health Center director, but he continues to remain active as the center’s medical director, mentor to researchers, and professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine.
In his career, Dr. Bailey has played a major role in shaping clinical care for a variety of pulmonary diseases, particularly tuberculosis (TB), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and asthma. At a gathering of Lung Health Center staff, Director Lynn B. Gerald, PhD, MSPH, and colleagues lauded his contributions and his infectious spirit of collaboration and generosity.
Dr. Bailey came to Birmingham as a NIH Associate Trainee at the Jefferson County Health Department in the late 1960s. He joined UAB’s faculty in 1973 and continued his work with the health department.
“He truly transformed how the health department managed tuberculosis patients,” says Professor and TKC® Chief of Staff Nancy E. Dunlap, MD, PhD, who trained under Dr. Bailey. “His development of the TB Medical Advisory Council to monitor case surveillance and management was a progressive step that forms the basis for the department’s programs today,” she says.
He played a major role in shifting care from the sanitorium to outpatient status. “Not only did he help close the book on the sanitorium age, but also he set the stage for public health in Alabama by insisting funds slated for the sanitoriums be transferred to the state health department’s TB budget, ensuring the success of that program,” Dr. Dunlap says. “He achieved national and international recognition in TB management and was one of the first to publish for the American Thoracic Society, the standard evidence-based therapy for mycobacterial diseases. He also was instrumental in establishing how to perform and prioritize contact investigations for tuberculosis.”
She identifies two publications that testify to Dr. Bailey’s astute powers of observation and his willingness to look at how practice can change. One led to elimination of routine outpatient X-rays for patients on preventive TB therapy, saving them from needless radiation exposure. The other paper identified an overlooked relationship between the antibiotic isoniazid and liver damage.
More recently Dr. Bailey compiled a predictive model to identify positive skin test results from contact investigations that Dr. Dunlap says “will become one of the most important papers in the field because it quantitates the exposure necessary to become infected with Myco-bacterium tuberculosis.”
Associate Professor Connie L. Kohler, DrPH, Department of Health Behavior, has worked with Dr. Bailey on smoking cessation and COPD programs. “He achieved funding for a federal Lung Health Study site at UAB that led to the creation of the Lung Health Center. He served on the program’s national steering committee for 20 years,” she says.
In his role as a member of the executive board of the National Lung Health Education Program Committee, Dr. Bailey served on the first Smoking Cessation Guideline Panel, convened in 1994 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. More recently he was involved in the second revision of the guidelines for treatments leading to tobacco independence.
Professor C. Michael Brooks, EdD, School of Health Professions, collaborated with Dr. Bailey starting in 1982 when the TB researcher became interested in starting a comprehensive asthma program. “Dr. Bailey had a remarkable career established in TB, but he was interested in doing more. The existing program’s behavioral psychosocial component was weak,” Dr. Brooks says. “He had a strong conviction that teaching people to manage their own asthma, not just treating exacerbations, would improve quality of life – and he has proved that to be the case.”
Dr. Brooks cites former UAB physician James M.Richards, MD, who acknowledged Dr. Bailey’s adherence to the highest ethical research standards. He insisted that study participants in control groups receive standard-of-care treatments rather than placebos, and he required that data collection procedures meet high standards of psychometric quality.
Drs. Bailey, Brooks, and others obtained the first peer-reviewed NIH grants and contracts that provided the funding and research base for the Lung Health Center. Now the center has completed 25 years of sustained funding for the TB, asthma, COPD, and smoking cessation research programs.
Dr. Brooks says, “Bill Bailey is a remarkable mentor, scientist, physician, and friend. We see the results of his dynamic and visionary leadership at every level of scholarship — investigator initiated awards, research networks, multi-institutional trials, framing of national research agendas, and development of evidence-based practice guidelines. He encourages and demands vision, commitment, honesty, and impeccable ethical standards, all with a passion for excellence and zeal to learn. He is a remarkable scholar in the truest sense of the word.”
“The center has been a leader in the field of clinical research largely because of Dr. Bailey’s leadership over the past 2 decades and has gained national recognition in many fields. We are very appreciative that he will continue to be actively involved in our activities, including mentoring our scientists,” says Dr. Gerald, who was the first full-time scientist at the Lung Health Center.