Karen Williams Teel

Karen Williams Teel, MD, a fierce advocate for excellence in the healthcare of Central Texas children and an outstanding clinician, mother, and friend, died of natural causes on Saturday, April 29, 2023, at Seton Medical Center in Austin. She was 84 years old.

Raised in small towns in Oklahoma and West Texas, she was the daughter of Betty Belle Poe New and Samuel Williams, newspaper publishers in Littlefield, TX, and Konawa, OK. Teel graduated with Honors in 1959 from Texas Tech University in Lubbock with majors in German and Pre-Med, and matriculated to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where she was one of three women in her 1963 graduating class. She would often say, “I became a physician because I wanted to be useful to the world.”

Teel’s further medical training took her to Cincinnati General Hospital for her rotating internship in 1963, and she completed her residency in pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in 1966. She then took a special fellowship in pediatric infectious disease at Baylor with her mentor Dr. Martha Yow, graduating in 1968.

Teel was then appointed a staff pediatrician and later Chief of Pediatrics at Bergstrom Air Force Base, working there until 1971. For the following five years, she was Director of Pediatric Education at Brackenridge Hospital where she founded and developed Austin’s first pediatric residency program, training residents who went on to careers around the country.

In 1977, Teel began her private practice of pediatrics, treating thousands of children–newborns through adolescents–and mentoring young colleagues in her central Austin clinic as well at St. David’s, Seton, and Brackenridge hospitals. She retired in 2005.

She was appointed a National Examiner for the American Board of Pediatrics in 1979 and, with her family, traveled around the United States giving oral exams to young physicians completing residency programs, serving until 1988. In addition, Teel was Chief of Pediatrics at Seton Hospital from 1982-84, and in 1982 was named Physician of the Year by Brackenridge Hospital.

Teel was instrumental in creating what are now commonplace in hospitals across the country: ethics committees. In 1975, she proposed the idea in an article in Baylor Law Review. Teel published in a law journal rather than one with a medical focus because the climate at the time within medicine was not receptive to the idea of committees tasked with the review of the ethics of clinical decisions.

Clinical-ethical issues were regarded more as dilemmas for the legal profession than that of physicians.

Teel suggested that the role of ethics committees was to help physicians deal with clinical-ethical dilemmas that arose in the practice of pediatrics. She expressed dismay at the “lines (drawn by the law) beyond which the rights of parents and other individuals do not extend. These lines must be more clearly defined…and there must be a system of advocacy…which ensures that a child’s rights are observed.”

Teel acknowledged that medical education did not provide much training about the ethical and legal dilemmas frequently encountered by physicians. Thus, she suggested, the potential benefits of ethics committee consultation were likely to outweigh the potential harms of such involvement in dilemmas like the removal of life-sustaining treatments and concerns commonly–and problematically–associated with euthanasia.

Teel’s article was cited by the New Jersey Supreme Court in its 1977 decision approving the removal of Karen Ann Quinlan’s ventilator.

For her contributions to the field of bioethics, Teel earned the Annual Award for Distinction in Bioethics from the International Bioethics Institute in San Francisco in 1992.

Her greatest civic contribution was the essential role she played, along with her colleague Milton Talbot, MD, in leading Austin pediatricians in a grassroots effort to establish the Children’s Hospital of Austin. In the early 1970s, Brackenridge Hospital had only four in-patient pediatric beds. Her vision was to make Austin competitive with the pediatric medical centers in cities such as Houston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia so children needing advanced medical treatment could be cared for in central Texas instead of in a distant locale.

She gathered a community of stakeholders–City of Austin political leaders, civic organizations, and, critically, her fellow pediatricians and sub-specialists–working in concert to create a home for excellence in inpatient pediatric medical care in central Texas.

She said, "We had to convince everyone that we were going to do it really well at one place so that any child who needs care will be taken care of at the Children's Hospital. Period." Teel was a deft and persuasive politician, and soon City leaders and colleagues joined her in that vision.

She poured herself into fundraising, telethon, and PR committees, and enlisted the support of the Junior League of Austin to help drive her vision. In her role as Founding President of the Pediatric Physician Alliance of Central Texas, she fielded the needs of her colleagues and saw to it that hospital leaders responded to them. The 60-bed Children’s Hospital of Austin (CHOA) opened near I-35 and 14th Street on Valentine’s Day 1988 under the auspices of the city-run Brackenridge Hospital.

Within a short but extremely successful twelve years, CHOA reached its capacity due to Austin’s growth in population.

In the early 2000s, Teel led yet another community effort by pediatricians and sub-specialists to build the region’s first and only stand-alone children’s hospital. Teel and others pushed to locate the new hospital in central Austin as opposed to further north where population growth was most significant. She said the hospital ”should be close to low-income neighborhoods where people lack transportation.”

With the visionary and generous leadership of Michael and Susan Dell in 2004, Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas became the community’s children’s hospital and opened with 176 beds at the centrally located Mueller development in 2007.

Growth continued apace at the hospital, as sub-specialists from around the US were recruited to Austin, allowing Dell Children’s to serve even more patients with complex needs in areas such as pediatric surgery, cardiology, orthopedic surgery, critical care medicine, oncology, neurology, gastroenterology, urology, and nephrology.

Now, Dell Children’s has nearly 300 beds at the Mueller Campus, and its 24-bed Grace Grego Maxwell Mental Health Unit is the only mental health facility in Texas that offers a continuum of care for children and adolescents.

Three weeks ago, Teel was honored by colleagues and community leaders at the opening of the Dell Children’s Hospital North Campus for her steadfast and visionary leadership.

Simply put, over her four-decade career, Teel was conspicuously and consistently instrumental in transforming the four-bed pediatric service of the 1970s-era Brackenridge Hospital into the center of national excellence in children’s healthcare that Austin and central Texas now enjoy.

After her retirement in 2005, Teel served on the boards of Seton Healthcare Network, The Children’s Medical Center Foundation, and Ronald McDonald House of Austin. She was also a Life Trustee at Dell Children’s Medical Center and Ronald McDonald House of Austin.

In 2003, The Pediatric Physician Alliance established The Karen Teel Excellence Award given annually to the outstanding pediatric resident at Dell Children’s Medical Center. In 2008, Dell Children’s also established an annual lectureship in physician education in her name.

She married her beloved husband Carl Teel in 1968 in Houston, and together they raised three children in West Lake Hills and then in Central Austin. After Teel retired, she and Carl built a house near Lake Austin and lived there until Carl’s death in 2009. Teel made her home at Longhorn Village in Steiner Ranch for the past 12 years.

Throughout her life she enjoyed all sports and most especially running and women’s basketball. She was passionate about eating healthy, and went to Whole Foods every weekend years before it was the cool thing to do.

Teel is survived by her son, Christopher B. Teel of Houston and his partner, Marcos Estécio; daughter, Caroline Teel Scott of Austin, her husband Jeffrey Scott, and their children Duncan, Ella and Stuart; and daughter, Anne A. Teel of Austin and her partner Joanna Mesecke. She is also survived by sisters Kari Collins of Wichita Falls, Margo Johnson of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Paula James of Ridgeway, CO.

A memorial service will be held on Tuesday, May 16th, at 10:30 am at Dell Children’s Medical Center in The Pat Hayes Education and Conference Center at 4900 Mueller Blvd. Austin, TX 78723.

Memorial contributions may be made in Karen Teel’s name to The Karen W. Teel, M.D. Lectureship Endowment at Dell Children’s or The Carl Teel Music Endowment for Music Therapy at Dell Children’s.