was no longer there to train in a gigantic medical center. But that’s not what we
wanted to do anyway. Those medical centers concentrate millions of dollars on
treating the people with the rarest, most exotic diseases and sending students
out to treat all those people in the nation’s biggest cities – but not necessarily the
areas of greatest need, which was our main interest. We had a different idea based
on something called the Australian model of medical education.
I found out about the Australian model when I became director of the
Program in Medical Sciences at Florida State in 1992. I hired Mike McGill,
the director of the family medicine residency program at Tallahassee Memorial
Hospital, to teach clinical skills to the PIMS students. I told him I had this idea
I wanted to take to the dean of the University of Florida medical school (which
I described in the preceding chapter). When I told him my idea, he said: “Myra,
you need to read about the Australian model of clinical training. There’s a medical
school in Australia, the Monash Medical School, that has written about this,
and they have a study out that you can download and read.” Which I did. I also
talked to some of the Monash faculty in person at the Harvard Macy program.
Australia had the same problem that we have in Florida and many other
states: the maldistribution of physicians. Medical students and residents often
stay where they’re trained. In Australia, that happens to be along the coast. The
doctors didn’t choose to go to the outback, which is where they were desperately
needed. So Monash decided it would start flying the students into the outback,
whether they wanted to go or not, and train them there as well. Guess what? It
worked. They got physicians in the outback. That’s the Australian model of medical
education.
And that’s where FSU got the idea to train students in the rural Panhandle of
Florida, in Sarasota, Orlando and elsewhere around the state: Put the campuses
where students are needed and train them there in the community. Get them
familiar with the community, the resources, the doctors, all the people. And
guess what? They meet people there. Sometimes they get job offers while they’re
still medical students. They come back there to practice medicine. That concept
worked in Australia. We were convinced it would work in Florida.
Our goal was to have our students spend their first two years at the central
campus learning basic science – then spend their third and fourth years at one
of our regional campuses learning the clinical side of medicine from practicing
physicians and their patients. The theory was sound. The results in Australia
were impressive. But, as you might imagine, setting up such a system involving
hundreds of physicians and dozens of health-care facilities across the state was
painstaking work.
Two people in particular were invaluable in establishing those campuses.
Mollie Hill was director of community clinical relations. Before working at the
College of Medicine, she had been executive director of Capital Medical Society.
Ocie Harris, before he became our dean, was our associate dean for medical
education. Before coming to FSU, he had taught pulmonary medicine at the
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