Charlie Roberts, Children's Mercy Hospital

Three decades ago, when he completed his residency in that specialty, here, Charlie Roberts could have convened a meeting of pediatric gastroenterologists in Kansas City while riding a unicycle: He was in a club of exactly one.

“Even after my training, there weren’t more than 60 or 70 pediatric gastroenterologists in the whole country,” he remembers—“and none in Kansas City.” It was, he said, a perfect match between physician and community. “I knew I wanted to be a pediatrician since as long as I can remember. However, after medical school and while in my pediatric residency at Children’s Mercy, I saw how great the need was for gastroenterologists specializing in children.”

And, of course, Kansas City roped this native of DeKalb, Ill., but good. “I never looked back. I’m so proud to call Kansas City home due to the wonderful people and the important purpose I found at Children’s Mercy Hospital,” he says. Throughout the decades, he found the biggest challenge was one of balance, trying to be “a good husband, good father and good physician all at the same time,” he says. “In my case, none of that balance would have been possible without the incredible support from my wife.” And with family firmly fixed in first, a close second was earning the trust of patients, families and colleagues, he said. “I think our patients and families, as well as my colleagues and staff, know and feel how much I care about them,” he said. “They also know that I’ll always give them and my work everything I can.”

As executive medical director and an executive vice president, Roberts spends much of his day in administrative tasks, but he still finds some time to treat children and answer an inner calling that first sounded back in medical school—one he says has always stayed with him. “As a second-year medical student, I visited with a young mother of three children immediately after she was told she had metastatic cancer,” he says. The woman previously had been urged to see a specialist, but had put that off for months because of the cost. “I don’t know if seeing that specialist would have made a difference, but at that moment, I promised myself I’d never be a part of a story like that,” Roberts says. “And because I’ve had the privilege of an entire career at Children’s Mercy Hospital, I’ve kept that promise.”

Brett Ferguson, Truman Medical Center

His car had rear-ended a truck with a piece of pipe protruding from the back, and the impact drove it through the man’s nose into his head. Brett Ferguson still recalls, 20 years later, an oral-maxillofacial surgeon’s challenge: “It took me 14½ hours to put his face back together,” Ferguson says. “When he came out of surgery and I saw him in clinic, it was almost as though he’d undergone a frontal lobotomy.” Fate can be cruel, but it has a flip side: Thanks in large part to Ferguson’s efforts, the patient recovered, married and became a father. The doctor, in fact, still sees him from time to time.

“You try not to have interpers-onal relationships with patients, but you can’t help but develop some when you treat a person over weeks, months and years,” Ferguson said. “It makes you feel a little humble,” he said. “It makes you feel as though you’ve made a difference.”

For more than a decade, he’s made that difference as chairman of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Truman Medical Center. He also holds the same title at UMKC’s School of Medicine, and chairs the School of Dentistry’s hospital dentistry program, working extensively at Truman, Children’s Mercy and Saint Luke’s hospitals.

A Kansas City native, he took a blue-collar path to medicine; in high school, he worked on Ford’s Claycomo assembly line during the summers. Then came Lane College in Jackson, Tenn.—he still has a tinge of the Southern accent he picked up there—before starting dentistry school at UMKC. The path to medicine, he said, fulfilled a childhood goal.

“My brother had cerebral palsey,” Ferguson said, “and had seven operations before the age of 10, so we were always at Children’s Mercy Hospital. I would see cleft-palate patients come in with faces that were different, and I said I wanted to make their faces look normal. I knew from a very, very early age what I wanted to do.”

Working in an urban hospital, he said, exposes you to the heart-wrenching side of medicine. Whether for lack of money or lack of self-awareness of their conditions, he said, people “come in with cancer and we have almost no chance to salvage their lives with a good quality.” It makes you acutely aware of the financial constraints in his work, “but you still have the empathy to want to treat everybody who needs treatment.”