Janet M. Walker
Emerita Councilor
2021 - present 

Janet Walker earned her medical degree (MD ’82) from Washington University in St. Louis and did her family medicine residency in Charleston at the Medical University of South Carolina. There she met one of the ABS founders, Clive Brock, and participated in the Balint group he led with Cleve Hudson even before there was a society to join. 

Her involvement in the ABS reads like a timeline of our first thirty years: she was present at the STFM conference planning meeting that organized the Society (1990); she was part of the pilot leader certification workshop that launched efforts at leader training (Sayre, 1999); she joined the governing Council in 2002; became Treasurer in 2005; became Coordinator of Intensives in 2013; served as faculty at a whopping seventeen Intensives; and transitions from President-Elect to President in 2021. 

Meanwhile she had a career in the Air Force teaching and practicing medicine and ‘retired’ to her horse farm outside Spokane, where she trains dressage horses.  This facility is familiar to several sets of Council members, because Janet hosted the annual business meeting there from 2010 to 2015. We were all impressed that the spacious home she had built with wife Kathy Hull was so well arranged that it accommodated hours and hours of meetings, breakout sessions and barbecues. 

Janet’s hosting of the business retreat had a quiet graciousness that all who know her would recognize as characteristic. Her deep kindness and generosity of spirit may be more impressive than her enormous list of accomplishments. She describes herself as detail-oriented and preferring to be behind the scenes making things more efficient and improving processes. This understates her impact. She garnered federal tax exempt, 501(c)3, status for the ABS.  She set up the first electronic payments and online registrations for the Society. She has applied for all CME we have awarded since 2005. She co-authored the Practical Guide and the budget template for planning intensives that allow Balint leaders to host trainings. She organized and led the first Intensive on the Road (2016) at Cherokee Health in Tennessee. In addition since 2015 she has served as one of the two financial auditors for the International Balint Federation.

Just as her career has spanned the full breadth of the Balint movement in the United States, her current work also encompasses the use of the method from medical school through continuing education. Currently serving as an Assistant Professor at Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, Janet has trained multiple Balint leaders on that faculty and has established exposure to Balint groups as a foundational aspect of the culture. She is also lead physician in an Occupational Medicine practice with Providence Healthcare in Spokane, where she is negotiating offering Balint groups to practitioners. 

When asked to name highlights of her Balint work, Janet bookended the decades, starting with leading weekly groups for Family Medicine residents for over a decade in the Air Force and ending with organizing an Intensive on the Road for the WSU medical school to staff groups for all sixty students in the inaugural class.  As the first sitting officer to be nominated an Emerita Councilor, she is clearly still having a major influence on and through the ABS.  Happily we expect more highlights to follow.