BusinessReport.com

Several years ago, Dr. William Clark came home from a night shift at 6 a.m. to find a phone message from the FBI, which made the young doctor a little nervous.

“What have I done now?” Clark remembers thinking.

Turns out, a friend of a friend was looking for a doctor to speak to a group of snipers about what happens to the human body when hit by a bullet. As an emergency medicine physician, Clark knows quite a bit about that subject, and the brush with law enforcement stirred a deeper interest. A little over four years ago, he offered his services, for free as a medical attachment to the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office’s SWAT team.

“All I asked is that I get the same training the rest of the guys get,” Clark says. So for basically the price of a box of bullets, he says, the SWAT team gets an extra officer who also happens to be a doctor. Few teams have their own “SWAT docs” because it’s usually too expensive, Clark says.

Clark went with the SWAT team to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina for search-and-rescue missions. His experience as an ER doctor who sees death and suffering regularly, along with his time at Earl K. Long Medical Center working with many desperately poor patients, might have helped prepare him for what he saw.

“Those folks (at Earl K. Long) need us every day,” he says. “New Orleans was like a big Earl K. Long.” He also spent time post-Katrina helping to run the makeshift hospital at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, which he says was the largest field hospital in U.S. history.

Clark still works in the emergency rooms at Earl K. Long, Lane Regional Medical Center in Zachary and St. Elizabeth Hospital in Gonzales. As the new medical director of the Bureau of EMS, he is the co-head, along with a non-physician administrator, of the state agency in charge of pre-hospital care, such as certification, testing and training of paramedics, emergency medical technicians and other first responders.

What was your first job?

“Certified karate instructor.”