Professional Recommendation
Samer Jundi, MD, on Zeinab Arafat
Internist and hospitalist; elected Chair, Department of Medicine, 2011–2020 · Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center
BACKGROUND
Samer Jundi earned his medical degree in 1985 and trained in internal medicine at Brown University. He has practised as an internist and hospitalist at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center for twenty-five years. From 2011 to 2020 he was the elected Chair of its Department of Medicine — re-elected four times — and has served on the hospital's Medical Council and on its credentialing, quality-care and performance-improvement committees.
Deciding whether a clinician is competent, safe and fit to care for patients is work he has done formally for much of his career. He sees Zeinab Arafat's patients at the point of escalation: when someone in her clinic is sicker than an urgent care can safely manage, they are sent to him.
FROM ZEINA
Dr. Jundi was the first physician at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center to call me directly. It was 2021. We had sent him a patient, and afterwards he phoned the clinic because he had questions about the case. Most people in his position would not have made that call.
Since then, when we send someone to the hospital, I tell the patient I am going to call ahead, and then I call. It means they are not walking into an emergency department as a stranger — somebody there already knows what we saw and why we were worried about it. I also call him when I am unsure about something and want to hear how he would approach it before I act.
He has been an internist for twenty-five years and spent ten of them running the department. In all that time he has never once made me feel like I was asking a question I should already have known the answer to.
THE LETTER
I know Zeinab's work from the place it matters most — the receiving end of a critical case.
Over the years they have sent several such patients, some of them gravely ill, and I can tell you plainly that people are alive today because of the decisions she made.
Her early recognition of a dangerous finding, and her judgment to escalate and coordinate with the hospital rather than wait, has repeatedly been the difference between a recovery and a tragedy. In hospital medicine, that instinct cannot be taught and cannot be faked.
In a career spent in part deciding which physicians were qualified to practice at our hospital, I have rarely been as confident in a clinician as I am in her.
All her patients that I see in the hospital praise Zeinab for her care and clear compassion.
Samer Jundi, MDPalm Beach Gardens Medical Center
Signed original held on file. Signature and contact details are not published, and the letter itself is not published. Dr. Jundi's letter spells her first name two ways. The spelling is made consistent above; no other word is altered. It comes down the same day if its author asks — see privacy.
WHAT IT DEMONSTRATES
Recognising an emergency early, and escalating it rather than waiting. Clinical Career.