PROGRESS
As I toured the regional campuses and met with the hospital CEOs, they
said they were pleased with our medical education program and our students,
but invariably asked: “What can you do to help us develop graduate medical
education programs?” Many of those hospitals were specialty-based and wanted
to grow their own physicians for the future, and one of the best ways to do that
would be to develop residency programs. So we did that. In fact, we have almost
150 residents now in FSU-sponsored programs.
• We worked with Lee Health in Fort Myers a couple of years and finally
persuaded them to start a family medicine residency program. That program
has increased from six residents per year to eight, and has become
popular with our graduates.
• At Sarasota Memorial Hospital, we started an internal medicine residency
program, plus an emergency medicine program that just recruited
its first class.
• With Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare, we’ve started internal medicine
and general surgery residency programs in the past five years. We hope to
start a psychiatry program in the next year or two.
• We affiliated with Dermatology Associates of Tallahassee to help start a
dermatology residency and a Mohs surgical fellowship.
• We partnered with Winter Haven Hospital to develop a family medicine
residency program, which will recruit its first class this year.
Concerned that we’d have difficulty providing Florida with the workforce it
truly needs, I decided around 2013 to pursue a PA training program. It took us
a few years to have it approved by the Board of Trustees and to get it accredited,
but in 2017 we brought in our first class of 40 PA students. They graduated in
December 2019. Just recently, we brought in our third class of 60 students. The
plan is to remain at 60 as our full-enrollment class. It’s a 27-month program,
with 15 months here at the main campus and then a 12-month clerkship phase
at the regional campus.
We did a complete evaluation to determine what type of practices we might
consider. As a result, FSU SeniorHealth is serving the community, predominantly
at the Westminster Oaks retirement community. With FSU PrimaryHealth, in
May 2019 we opened a 10,000-square-foot medical building with practices for
primary care and behavioral health. Adjacent to Sabal Palm Elementary School,
it has been received very well by that underserved community and is growing by
leaps and bounds. We hope to develop FSU BehavioralHealth in Tallahassee over
the next year.
In concert with Drs. Hurt and Livingston, the FSU College Medicine engaged
with seven other colleges across campus to develop the Interdisciplinary Medical
Sciences Program, which gives undergraduates interested in health careers some
career options, career opportunities and several tracks for them to follow as they
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