Stories in some Florida newspapers stressed the struggles involved in creating
a medical school – especially the “trailers” that served as offices. We got no
respect! (Photo by St. Petersburg Times)
WHY FLORIDA NEEDED A NEW MED SCHOOL
One day in the 1990s, when I was director of Florida State’s Program in
Medical Sciences, I was reading an article in the public health journal
of the state of New York. Scholars had been looking at the number of
medical residents trained in New York City. It was a big number. In fact, the
residents trained in New York were furnishing doctors for a number of states in
the U.S. And guess what? Florida was one of them. A huge number of doctors in
Florida were trained in New York City, and almost all of them were international
medical graduates from Asia.
In other words, the brain drain from Asia was furnishing an enormous number
of doctors for Florida in the ’90s. Those studies were provided to the Florida
Board of Regents when it was considering the creation of Florida State’s medical
school. Something like 90 percent of the doctors in Florida came from New
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