Dr. Alice Coombs
Alice Coombs, M.D., F.A.C.P., was elected vice president of the Massachusetts Medical Society at the organization’s annual meeting, held last month at the Seaport Hotel in Boston.
Coombs, a resident of Sharon, Mass., is a critical care specialist at South Shore Hospital and an anesthesiologist with South Shore Anesthesia Associates. She will serve one term as one of the top three officers of the society, the statewide professional association representing more than 20,000 physicians, residents and medical students throughout Massachusetts.
A member of the society since 1990, Coombs has long been active in organized medicine, serving in a variety of capacities. For the last two years, she has served as secretary-treasurer of the society. In addition to being a member of the society’s board of trustees and its house of delegates, Coombs is a member of the American Medical Association’s Commission to Eliminate Healthcare Disparities and the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine’s Patient Care Assessment Committee.
She is also a former member of the Massachusetts State Commission to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Disparities, and a past chair of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s Committee on Ethnic Diversity. At South Shore Hospital, she chairs the Ethics Committee.
In 2005, she was award the society’s 2005 Henry Ingersoll Bowditch Award for Excellence in Public Health, an annual award given to a physician who demonstrates creativity, commendable citizenship, initiative, innovation and leadership in the public health and advocacy fields. One of her major public health activities for several years has been her annual anti-smoking program for South Shore youth, “Smoking — Don’t Go There,” an adaptation of a program produced by the American College of Chest Physicians. Coombs developed the program in 1999.
A graduate of the UCLA School of Medicine, Coombs is board-certified in the medical specialties of internal medicine, anesthesiology, and critical care. She is a diplomat of the National Board of Medical Examiners and a Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians.
