UF to establish emergency medicine residency in Gainesville

December 6, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The University of Florida College of Medicine will open an emergency medicine residency-training program on the Gainesville campus next July, college officials announced.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has approved the college’s plan to begin an emergency medicine residency program, making Gainesville just the fourth city in the state where emergency medicine training is offered.

“Throughout Florida there is a need for emergency physicians, particularly in rural areas,” said Dr. David Seaberg, a professor and associate chairman of the emergency medicine department and chief of emergency services at Shands at UF. “The best way to keep them here is to have residency programs. Most physicians end up working within 250 miles of where they trained.”

Emergency medicine was the college’s only major medical specialty not to have a residency program in Gainesville, Seaberg said. The college does have an emergency medicine residency program in Jacksonville, and the 45 residents who are trained there complete some of their rotations in Gainesville.

The new program will start smaller, accepting about eight residents a year for a total of 24 in the three-year program, and it will not duplicate the Jacksonville residency, said Kevin L. Ferguson, M.D., a UF clinical assistant professor and director of graduate medical education for the emergency medicine department.

Emergency residents in both programs will see different types of patients because Shands at UF serves a more rural eight-county area of the state, whereas the hospital in Jacksonville draws patients primarily from the city, Ferguson said.

But the biggest difference could be the curriculum. Ferguson has engineered the Gainesville curriculum to be accessed primarily online, allowing residents to view digital reading materials and watch taped lectures, no matter when they are working. Residents will meet in small groups to discuss and analyze their own interactions with patients and to learn things best taught in closer quarters, like how to bring all the different resources of the hospital together to help patients, Ferguson said.

“That’s very difficult to teach in a lecture,” he said. “And if residents don’t know how to bring all these systems together, they’re not going to be effective.”

Residents also will use simulators to show they are capable of performing certain procedures after they have finished different rotations.

Seaberg, who was once the emergency medicine residency director for the College of Medicine in Jacksonville, said he came to Gainesville in 2000 with the goal of establishing a residency program here within five years.

The emergency department cleared one of its biggest hurdles this year when Shands at UF was named a Level 1 trauma center. Opening a trauma center at Shands at UF was a goal emergency department officials wanted to accomplish before starting a residency program here, Ferguson said.

“There is literature that shows that going to a trauma center with an emergency medicine training program greatly improves patient outcomes because they are met at the door by people who are experts,” Ferguson said.

The department likely will hire some new faculty members, too, mostly because the number of patients visiting the emergency room is up about 8 percent to 10 percent. With a new emergency room and trauma center slated to be built at the planned cancer hospital, that number could grow, Seaberg said. More than 40,000 patients visit the Shands at UF emergency room each year.

The department is currently accepting applications.