Mia Nasif immersed herself in play, naming each of the residents of a two-story doll house.

“There's mommy, and daddy, and grandma,” she said before the doll family began a pretend adventure involving a raccoon and a bear.

“Mia, share the little girl (doll) with me,” her mother Sarah said. Mia hesitated for a few seconds, but then complied.

It may sound like imaginative play between a child and parent, because it is, but for the Nasif family and others, it is so much more.

Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, or PCIT, offered at the Center for the Advancement of Youth at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, is that instruction book that parents may wish their children came with, said psychologist Dr. Dustin Sarver, assistant professor of pediatrics.

The therapy puts the child in a play situation with a parent, who is wearing an earpiece to hear coaching from psychologists in the next room. The doctors watch, by way of a two-way glass, and listen to the interaction between parent and child, coaching the parent through the situation as it unfolds.

The evidence-based treatment for young children with emotional and behavioral disorders places emphasis on improving the quality of the parent-child relationship and changing interaction patterns between parents and their children.

“It minimizes the amount of time parents get upset in the moment and gives parents specific skills to enhance their parenting,” Sarver said.

Patients sometimes have no idea what health care professionals are talking about (“Edema”? Is that a Disney princess or a disease?)

But when those professionals literally don't speak the patients' language, the communication gap can become a chasm.

In that vein, dozens of dental and medical students here have their ojos wide open. Or their yeux.

They meet in student interest groups to absorb medical terms and phrases in Spanish or French - languages that could prove helpful in their clinics and/or during humanitarian mission trips abroad.

NOTE: This article originally appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of Mississippi Medicine, the semi-annual alumni magazine for the School of Medicine. A PDF of that issue can be found here.

For as long as Katrina Poe can remember, her hometown had a doctor - Dr. L.C. Henson, who delivered her.

He was there for her when she was born; she would be there for him when he died.

He was her family's doctor, and she became his - and just about everybody else's in town - a career choice inspired by Henson and, ironically, by her mother Bessie Poe.

Kilmichael - “The Town that Cares” - is the kind of place that desperately needs physicians who care, but also the kind that usually has trouble attracting or churning them out, and maybe that's why no one could blame Bessie Poe for her response to her 10-year-old daughter the day she announced she was going to be one.

“Oh, girl, just sit down somewhere,” Bessie Poe told her.

But she didn't sit down, and she didn't sit on her dream, because, even then, 35 years ago, few people cared more about Kilmichael than did Katrina Poe.

One day, as a doctor, she would help save the town's hospital and, as a daughter, the life of her mother.

'I told you, didn't I?'

Putting a child through medical school had seemed beyond the family's means when 10-year-old Katrina had announced her intentions, Bessie Poe said.

“Back then, it was hard. We didn't have money or nothing. We were just factory workers.”

Besides, the town had never had an African-American physician.

Eventually, the factory where the Poes worked, Steel Apparel, closed and moved away. James Poe found a new job at an air conditioner manufacturing plant in Grenada, about 40 miles distant.

Before that, even Katrina worked at the factory in the hours after school, cutting material and doing inspections. She and her sister Cheryl Poe, who is earning her RN degree, learned the value of work.

“My husband used to plant peas for them, and they would pick them, and he would take them around town so they could sell them to different people,” Bessie Poe said.

“He told both of them, 'I want you to learn how to do something for yourself. Because if you get an old lazy man for a husband, you will be able to take care of yourself.'”

The Medical Center is proud to announce the following additions to its faculty and leadership staff.

The Mississippi Nurses Association and the Mississippi Nurses Foundation honor numerous School of Nursing faculty; a national emergency medicine organization recognizes a UMMC faculty member for his exceptional leadership; and a neurobiology chair earns Fellow status from a national anatomists association.