In 2003, soon after starting her family medicine residency training at St. Luke’s Bethlehem Campus, Nguyet-Cam Vu (pronounced Wit Cam Voo) Lam, MD, set her heart on spending her career with St. Luke’s, taking care of patients and training young physicians.
At St. Luke’s, Dr. Lam, who goes by the informal first name Cam, found the kind of organizational culture that matched her own values.
“St. Luke’s is so welcoming, and its mission of caring for and about people aligns directly with mine,” she explains.
Today, as program director of the family medicine residency at St. Luke’s Bethlehem since 2018, and family physician at Star Community Health, Dr. Lam is in her 23rd year with the Network, which has been ranked by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the nation's top health system for quality, safety and patient experience.
Earlier this year Dr. Lam was named the Pennsylvania Academy of Family Physicians 2026 Family Physician of the Year. The award recognizes an extraordinary doctor who demonstrates a commitment to the physician-patient relationship, provides comprehensive, compassionate patient care, demonstrates leadership in her specialty and maintains the highest ethical standards as a clinician and teacher.
“You epitomize what is best about Family Medicine and St. Luke’s,” her colleague Robert Langan, MD, program director of St. Luke’s Sacred Heart Family Medicine Program, said to her recently. With her characteristic humility, Dr. Lam responded, “It’s a team effort.”
Dr. Lam’s humanitarian values had developed from growing up in a family that immigrated to California from Vietnam when she was 16. They struggled to gain access to health services, especially for her brother who had to go to the emergency room without insurance for medical issues. “We were very poor and uninsured,” she explains, adding they often experienced food insecurity and had to rely on a local church to be able to eat.
This inspired her to pursue medicine so she could take care of the underserved while training future generations of primary care physicians to join or succeed her. Since 2018, St. Luke’s has hired an average 64% of graduating St. Luke’s Bethlehem family medicine residents.
After earning a bachelor’s degree from UCLA, Dr. Lam completed medical school at Kigezi International School of Medicine, Cambridge, England, and Uganda, Africa. She then matched at St. Luke’s, allowing her to live near her future-husband’s home in Philadelphia. The learning and clinical practice during residency were rigorous, and the support from faculty physicians and fellow residents was genuine and kind. Initially, Dr. Lam had thought she would return to California to be close to her family. But the calling to fulfill her dream of training the residents and caring for the community at St. Luke’s was too strong for her to resist. 2026 marks her 20th anniversary in academic medicine.
In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Dr. Lam provides routine, preventive, chronic, and acute care to patients. She also delivers babies, which brings her great satisfaction and gives her the opportunity to develop long-term trusting relationships with her patients, treating many from birth to death. She still takes care of a young man whom she delivered early in her residency, who is now a student at Lehigh University.
“I often have three to four generations of families as patients, so I get to know them at all ages and life stages.”
Some of them are Vietnamese immigrants who, like her own family, seek medical care with challenges in social determinants of health. She speaks their language and knows their customs and family dynamics and understands their health needs and challenges at various stages, all which helps her provide compassionate, effective care.
Dr. Lam, 53, hopes to retire some day from St. Luke’s but is in no rush. She’s passionate about training future doctors practicing full-spectrum family medicine, delivering babies and caring for patients, alongside her colleagues.
She and her husband, Steven Nguyen, live in Center Valley with their three grown daughters—Grace, Christy and Abby--who all are studying pre-medicine with the hope of becoming doctors, says Dr. Lam.
She hopes one will choose family medicine as her specialty at St. Luke’s, so Dr. Lam can pass on her knowledge to her and even work with her side-by-side one day.
“I’m privileged to work here with wonderful people,” she says. “Our patients, colleagues and residents--we are all part of our extended family.”
