Ayeni’s advocacy shines as preceptor at the Springfield Clinical Campus

Opeyemi Ayeni, MD grew up surrounded by medicine. Her dad is a pharmacist and her uncle is a doctor, plus a few other doctors are spread out across her family tree.

“I liked to take care of people, I liked to take care of anything that was hurting. I just wanted to make it better,” Ayeni said. “I think it all stems from growing up seeing them and how they helped people, to now discovering my love to help.”

Today, she works as a hospitalist at Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri. Ayeni also serves as an associate clerkship director for the MU School of Medicine at the Springfield Clinical Campus, volunteering her time to teach medical students. She was recently recognized at the 2024 Springfield Campus Faculty Appreciation Dinner as the Internal Medicine Preceptor of the Year and was presented with the Morton Award.

“I try to make the environment conducive and comfortable for learning,” Ayeni said. “I tell them, ‘This is your chance to make mistakes because things can be corrected.’ When you have to make decisions that will affect somebody's life, that's where mistakes are not acceptable.”

Ayeni makes it a point to show students how to relate to patients and their families. Trust, she says, is one of the most important tools when treating patients and putting together a successful care plan.

“I show them how to make your patients comfortable with you, to trust you enough to tell you everything going on with them and to also trust the decisions that you make for them,” Ayeni said. “Enough to say, ‘Yes, this person made the right decision for me.’”

Advocating for a patient and their health care is important to Ayeni – enough that it became one reason she left her home country of Nigeria.

“It's a beautiful country, it's a good country, but we do have our problems, and health care is one of those problems,” Ayeni said. “There is no equality in health care over there. If you're very rich, you'll get good health care. If you're not rich, then you're going to get very substandard care. People were dying of things that you could easily prevent, and that was not acceptable to me.”

Ayeni moved to the United States for residency in 2013 and has stayed since. Though she’s still deciding on a subspecialty within internal medicine, she finds herself naturally gravitating toward being an educator, and has no plans to stop.

“For this last year that I have been with MU, I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I have met all kinds of people in my students,” Ayeni said. “You'd be amazed at their stories and how they ended up in medicine or what led them to medicine.”