At Baptist Memorial Hospital in Columbus Monday, six new doctors received their white coats.
And they weren’t just new to Baptist — they were new doctors, period. The six physicians, who come from all over the United States, are fresh out of medical school and beginning an internal medicine residency.
It’s the first internal medicine residency in all the Baptist hospitals, and only the third in the state, said program director Dr. Chris LeBrun.
“These folks will either be internal medicine doctors, hospitalists or enter one of the internal medicine sub-specialties. … This is the start, basically, of (their) training,” he said.
An internal medicine residency is a good steppingstone for doctors who want to specialize in a particular type of medicine. Doctors who take that path complete three years of internal medicine, followed by three years of residency in their specialized interest — cardiology, nephrology or countless other options. Internal medicine residents perform a series of four-week rotations over three years, working with doctors and patients in the intensive care unit, emergency room, in clinics, in cardiology ambulatory and neurology.
“(Internal medicine) gave me a scenario where I could have the medicine background and also incorporate the preventative medicine side, which is what I’m more interested in,” said Dr. Sadegh Saleknezhad, who recently moved to Columbus from Arlington, Virginia. “Basically it’s a broad training system. Aside from being trained with children, you see everything else.”
The residency is also a good way to train for doctors wanting to go into primary care. That concentration is what attracted Dr. Linh Van to Baptist.
Thanks to comparatively lower pay, there’s a shortage of primary care doctors in the country right now, Van said — another reason the internal residency is so important.
“It’s the front line of patient care, so that’s where I want to be, to be able to address all the issues a patient has, not just one,” she said.
More hands-on than most residencies
LeBrun called it a “graded system of training” — the residents will work directly with attending physicians for the first six months and get progressively less supervision as their residency goes on. As doctors, the residents will do everything a doctor can do in terms of diagnosing and treating patients.
“The biggest difference, I would say, is you have somebody checking your work,” Saleknezhad said. “So my attendings will OK or modify things that I do or say. … You know you have that safety net of more experienced, seasoned physicians around you.”
It’s a small residency — though Baptist will add 12 over the next two years for a total of 18 — which will allow the residents more hands-on experience with core faculty and attending physicians than if they were in a residency at a larger institution-based hospital like the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
“In a typical academic setting, you have several degrees of separation from residents and attending (doctors),” said Dr. Matthew Wade, part of the residency’s core faculty.
At hospitals with large residency programs, first-year residents won’t see much of the attending physicians because those physicians are working with so many third-year residents, second-year residents and interns before they get to brand new doctors, Wade said. The six residents at Baptist will start work with Wade, LeBrun and other doctors at Baptist immediately.
But there’s a benefit to the hospital too, LeBrun said — even apart from six new doctors joining its staff. The Baptist residency could be the beginning of a new surge in primary care physicians in Columbus.
“People tend to stay where they train,” he said.
Now, most doctors in the state are in Jackson or on the coast, LeBrun said. There’s a shortage of primary care physicians in the Golden Triangle, which means patients will travel to Tupelo or sometimes even farther away to get their care — giving economic benefits to those areas.
“There was a study done by the University of Oklahoma over 10 years ago that showed keeping one care physician in an area is worth over $1 million to that area each year,” LeBrun said. “Because now you’re not going to Tupelo to get your care and you’re not getting an x-ray somewhere else and you’re not getting a prescription filled somewhere else and you’re not driving somewhere else and you’re not eating in Tupelo when you go there.
“The economic growth here has really outgrown the medical growth here, and we need to catch up with that,” he added. “This is one way of catching up with that.”
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