serving well in the communities of greatest need and meeting the social and
health care mandate that our college has been created to serve. This college’s
mission came directly from the PIMS mission: to serve the rural and urban areas
and the elders, all of those with the greatest health care needs. Early clinical experience
was part of the PIMS tradition, and PIMS graduates went to Gainesville
knowing how to treat patients better than their UF colleagues did. They stood
out in their clinical rotations. So I’m not knocking PIMS. I’m just saying that
there was a moment when somebody took their eye off the ball and wasn’t paying
attention to the quality of the education.
In the June before I became director, half of our students flunked the Step
1 exam. Only a very few of the UF cohort did. The situation was dire indeed.
We had to do something. It was left up to me. Because of my long history as an
educator, it was a no-brainer for me to look at the educational needs of the PIMS
students and say, “Let’s get the UF first-year faculty together with the FSU firstyear
faculty and make sure they’re on the same page, and make sure that PIMS
students go to Step 1 with the best possible preparation so that they can kick the
s--- out of their first-year colleagues from UF.”
Result? About one year later, all the students passed the exam. We hired new
faculty. With the biology department chair’s cooperation, we began to look
closely at the quality of the teaching and the program. We had joint retreats with
UF. The teaching at FSU and at UF began to be comparable. Performance began
to be equivalent. I went to UF curriculum meetings for four years, and I have a
great deal of respect for how serious they are about their medical education and
what a good job they do. Thanks to our combined efforts, PIMS flourished. A
very good program, whose mission was to return doctors to the Panhandle of
Florida, began to perform well again. The program became the foundation of the
Florida State College of Medicine.
I’m reminded of a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. on the subject of desegregation:
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
The PIMS program was formed in 1970. June 15, 2020, will be the College
of Medicine’s 20th anniversary. So the arc of justice was spinning slowly over
those years, waiting for the time when Sandy D’Alemberte became president,
John Thrasher became speaker of the Florida House, Crestview physician Durell
Peaden was elected to the House – and I became the last director of PIMS. I
got to work with all of them to create this distributed model that we see as
today’s College of Medicine. We are already meeting the health-care mandate
that Durell wrote into law. We are placing more doctors in the areas of greatest
need. The health care crisis that was looming on the Florida Panhandle’s horizon
is beginning to fade. The arc of the moral universe did reach justice, finally. •
22 | Breaking the Mold