SANTA ROSA BEACH — A partnership among Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast hospital, the University of Florida College of Medicine, and the Walton County Health Department is working toward a medical residency program that eventually will see a rotating supply of 18 family medicine residents working in the county.
Work on the program is underway, with a goal of earning accreditation through the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education by the first of next year and bringing an initial group of six residents to the county by June 2023, according to Dr. Joshua Hodge, director of the University of Florida Family Medicine Residency Program.
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Six doctors will be brought into the program each year, meaning that over the first three years of the program, 18 residents will come to the county. From then on, there will always be 18 residents working in the community, as incoming residents replace residents moving out of the program.
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The first three years of funding will be supported by Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast, Ascension Medical Group and the Walton County Health Department, along with anticipated support from the state for primary care training programs, according to a Friday news release from Ascension Sacred Heart.
A residency program provides in-depth training for new physicians who have recently graduated from medical school. In Walton County, the program will provide medical school graduates with three years of training in family medicine at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast, at the Walton County Health Department’s Coastal Branch Clinic in Santa Rosa Beach and in area physicians’ offices.
At the Health Department, the residency program will boost the current staff — now comprising of one physician, several nurse practitioners, and a physician assistant — as residents work under the supervision of an attending physician.
Additionally, according to Health Department Administrator Holly Holt, the program will move the county toward addressing a shortage of primary care physicians.
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In a Tuesday presentation to the Walton County Board of County Commissioners announced the residency program, Holt referenced the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps report, an annual nationwide initiative of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
According to the 2021 report, Walton has one primary care physician for every 1,830 residents. That’s lower than the statewide ratio of one primary care physician for every 1,380 people, and a still worse number than what the report calls “top performer” counties across the country, where there is one primary care physician for every 1,030 people.
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Neighboring Okaloosa County to the west has one primary care physician for every 1,310 residents and neighboring Bay County to the east has one primary care physician for every 1,780 residents.
The residency program “will help us, because we hope that once we get the physicians that go through the medical resident program and they learn about the community, they’ll want to stay here,” Holt said in a Friday interview.
Holt said she was contacted by the University of Florida and Ascension Sacred Heart — which operates hospitals and medical facilities across Northwest Florida — about starting a residency program.
Holt said Hodge with the University of Florida and other physicians will begin working out of the Santa Rosa Beach clinic within the next few months as they begin to build the program. In the meantime, she said the Health Department is remodeling the clinic in anticipation of the incoming doctors.
Hodge said the residents will work in the emergency, obstetrics and other specialty clinics at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast, but their time also will include working at least one day each week in the Health Department’s Coastal Branch clinic.
Hodge said outpatient clinics like the county’s Santa Rosa Beach facility were “a cornerstone of family medicine,” and said the residency program could bring after-hours and weekend service to the clinic.
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At Tuesday’s County Commission meeting, Commissioner Danny Glidewell, whose district includes northern portions of the county, asked whether the program might also boost Health Department services beyond its Santa Rosa Beach clinic.
“The farther north you go, the less doctors you have,” Glidewell told Hodge, Holt, and others involved in establishing the residency program.
Holt said Friday that getting residents into other Health Department clinics “is a goal.”
“We would love to see them move into our different clinics,” she said.
In the Friday news release, Ascension Sacred Heart officials noted the shortage of primary care physicians in the area.
“With the growth taking place along the Emerald Coast, there is a significant shortage of primary care physicians. The projections are that the shortage will worsen in the years ahead,” Dr. Peter Jennings, chief medical officer at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola and an associate professor of pediatrics in the University of Florida College of Medicine, said in the release.
“The residency program will bring new physicians to train here, but we also expect that a large number of those who graduate from the family medicine training will choose to remain and practice long-term on the Emerald Coast,” Jennings added.
“UF Health, Ascension Sacred Heart, and the Department of Health share a common goal of improving the health of our Florida communities,” Hodge said in the news release. “There is a real need for more primary care physicians in Walton County and across the Florida Panhandle. The family medicine residency program will be a big step forward in achieving our goal.”
On a related note, the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida and the Florida Hospital Association are asking state lawmakers to consider doubling the amount of money the state spends on medical residencies. This year, $38 million was set aside for clinical training of aspiring physicians.
“If you don’t expand your health care workforce and your health care infrastructure in a sensible way, it actually can act as a brake on growth because people don’t necessarily want to move to a place or relocate to a place that doesn’t have what they view as a strong health care infrastructure,” Justin Senior, CEO of Safety Net, said in the news release.
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