bringing surgical leadership to Mount Vernon, Maine

That early work shaped how he thinks about pressure, teamwork, and staying calm when something goes wrong.

Reight studied psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, then trained as a doctor at the Medical University of the Americas. Over the course of his career he has taken on several leadership posts alongside his surgical work: medical staff president, chief of surgery, and medical director of a breast centre and of a wound care and hyperbaric programme. He has also led as a robotic surgery surgeon, a role that sits at the newer end of general surgery.

Ian’s path has never run in a straight line from operating theatre to boardroom and back. He has treated leadership as part of the job, not separate from it, which is why he has moved between clinical roles and administrative ones without seeing much of a divide. Now based in Mount Vernon, Maine, he continues that pattern: seeing patients, running a surgical practice, and keeping an eye on how the systems around care actually work.

He writes and speaks about medicine and leadership, drawing on the same instincts he built as a first responder: assess quickly, communicate clearly, and do not let ego get in the way of the outcome. That grounding, more than any single title, is what he brings to Mount Vernon.

Interview with Ian Reight

You grew up in Maryland but you’re practising in Mount Vernon, Maine now. How did that move come about?

Maryland is where I’m from, it’s where I trained early on and where I did my firefighting and paramedic work. Maine is where I practise now. Mount Vernon is a small place, and that changes the job in ways people don’t always expect. You’re not one of a dozen general surgeons in a big system. You’re often the surgeon a patient has met, and will meet again.

What’s different about practising surgery in a small Maine town compared to a bigger market?

The distances matter more. If a patient needs a specialist referral or a longer recovery stay, that’s not always five minutes away. You plan around that. You also tend to know more about a patient’s life before they ever get to the table, because word travels and because you see the same families over years, not just once.

Does that change how you approach a first consultation?

A little. In a bigger city, a first meeting is often the only meeting where you’re building trust from zero. In Mount Vernon, there’s usually some context already there, whether from the patient themselves or from someone they know who I’ve treated before. That doesn’t mean I skip steps. I still walk through the same things every time: what the procedure involves, what recovery looks like, what could go wrong. But the conversation starts from a slightly different place.

You’ve held both clinical and administrative leadership roles. Does a smaller setting change how you think about leadership?

It sharpens it, honestly. In a large hospital, a leadership title can mean managing systems you rarely see up close. In a smaller setting, you see the direct effect of a decision almost immediately. If a follow-up process isn’t working, you hear about it from the patient the next week, not from a report months later. That immediacy keeps you honest.

What drew you to general surgery in the first place, going back to your time in Maryland?

The firefighting and paramedic work came first. That taught me to work under pressure and to trust a process even when things are moving fast. Surgery asked something similar of me, but with more time to prepare and more room to think ahead of the moment itself. Psychology, which I studied before medicine, gave me another piece: patients aren’t just a set of symptoms. How they understand what’s happening to them affects how they recover.

How has your work in wound care and breast centre leadership shaped your day-to-day surgical practice now in Maine?

Those roles taught me to look past the operation itself and think about the whole arc of care. Wound care in particular is unglamorous but it tells you a lot about whether a recovery is on track. I carry that habit into general surgery here: I don’t consider a case finished at the incision closing. I want to know how it heals, and I want the patient to know what to watch for too.

What does a typical week look like for you in Mount Vernon?

It’s a mix of clinical time and the kind of oversight work I’ve done for years, just on a smaller scale. Fewer layers between me and the decision, which I don’t mind. At home, my dogs and cooking are how I switch off. Neither has anything to do with surgery, and that’s the point.

Is there anything about practising in a small Maine town that surprised you?

How much continuity matters to patients. In a larger system, people expect to be handed between providers. Here, they expect to see the same face again, and that expectation has made me more careful about the small things: a follow-up call, a clear explanation, remembering the details of someone’s case without having to check the chart first.