College of Medicine Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education and Academic Affairs, Anthony Speights, M. D., makes a point as he addresses the class.
with a reservoir of compassion and caring. It’ s like a river, flowing from you to your patients. Guard against becoming jaded, because it will dam that river up, but also keep in mind that if your reservoir is constantly flowing, it has to be refilled, or it will run dry.
“ Find and do things that refill that reservoir of compassion and caring. Caring is integral. Patients don’ t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
Clearly, the 22nd graduating class would have made Van Durme proud. More than one-third of the class— 43 students, to be precise— were honored on the eve of commencement at the annual awards ceremony.
Ben Linkous, who completed his final two years at the Pensacola Regional Campus near his hometown of Gulf Breeze, received the Mission Award. Linkous is headed to Newark, Delaware for a general surgery residency; a departure from the family medicine route he initially envisioned for himself. His third-year rotation through the Marianna Rural Program, at the 100-bed Jackson Hospital, changed his trajectory, thanks to the influence of doctors Vechai Arunakul and John Brunner.
“ I fell in love with rural healthcare and what the general surgeon can do in those types of communities,” Linkous said.“[ Arunakal and Brunner ] were huge role models for me, being able to see how they impacted the community. … Eventually, the plan is to come back to the Panhandle and be the rural general surgeon in a community along I-10.
“ It’ s everything you want in a profession. Getting to experience humanism in your day-to-day job, it gave me the breadth of working with anyone from kids to the geriatric population, working in emergency situations and more relaxed settings. Being a rural surgeon was just hitting all of the marks for me; being able to be that strong community figure, have a wide-scope practice and come in every day and just be like,‘ Man, I love where I’ m at.’” Continued on page 13
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