UT Health Pittsburg training docs in rural medicine

When the UT Health Science Center at Tyler needed a new home for its Rural Family Medicine Residency Program, it selected UT Health Pittsburg for its new classes of residents.

The program launched in June on the Pittsburg campus following the March acquisition of the East Texas Medical Center system by the UT Health system and Ardent Health.

The three residents are getting a top-notch education while calling Pittsburg and rural Camp County home. They are Dr. Gaurav Mehta, chief resident and a third-year resident, and Drs. Christian Ferrer and Moises Plasencia, both second-year residents.

“It is an honor to host the program here,” said UT Health Pittsburg CEO Warren Robicheaux. “Everybody is getting something out of this. The residents are getting an education, and we are getting the benefit of being a teaching facility and the resources that come with that.”

Robicheaux said he and Dr. Leslie Tingle, the program’s director, want the residents to feel at home in Pittsburg.

“We want our community members to help us make them feel special because that’s one of the selling points to a rural community is the personalization, knowing people. That’s what makes us different from the big city,” Robicheaux said. “I want people to get the word out so that when they see them in the grocery store, at church or a restaurant, they say hi to them.”

The residency program, accredited through the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, moved to Pittsburg from Sulphur Springs. According to the UT Health website, during the first year, residents have access to nearly 1,000 inpatient teaching beds while working at UT Health East Texas and CHRISTUS Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler. Residents move to Pittsburg for the second and third years of the program, where they develop a continuity clinic practice and provide inpatient care at UT Health Pittsburg.

The program is one of the UT system’s newest programs. UT Health Science Center at Tyler sponsors four other residency programs in family medicine, occupational medicine, and psychiatry based in Tyler and internal medicine based in Longview. The health care system plans to launch a second internal medicine residency and a surgery residency at the UT Health Tyler campus in July 2020.

Dr. Ifeanyi Elueze, UT Health’s vice president for medical education and professional development, said the UT system is the only organization sponsoring these types of continuing medical education programs in East Texas. The rural residency program gives the physicians not only training in Level 1 trauma centers, but in a rural hospital environment with an end goal in mind.

“Most of the residents will pick a rural medical family residency program because they want to practice in a rural area,” Elueze said. “For us, we want to train them, so they will want to stay in Pittsburg.”

He said nationally; there is a 70 percent chance that residents will remain in the area where they did their residency.

While training in Pittsburg, the residents work in monthly rotation schedules, gaining experience in all areas of the hospital including family medicine, emergency room, surgery, and working with the inpatient hospital as well as physicians in the community. They also come together for lectures, workshops and case presentations during grand rounds, which UT Health Tyler broadcasts to the rural campus through a broadband telecommunication line.

“We have three major goals; patient care, education, and research. For us to provide care, we must educate,” Elueze said. “Everything we do boils down to how does this help us take good care of our patients, so at the end of the day, we want to provide excellent, quality medical care for you.”

He said the rural residency program is one of the avenues to provide that quality care for people in Pittsburg and the surrounding area. But the educational opportunity doesn’t stop with the residents.

“We’re doing something here that has somewhat of a halo effect in that all of the training for the residents are open to any of our medical staff,” Robicheaux said. “Healthcare is always evolving, and some of our physicians are very well trained, but things change, so our clinical staff can participate in the grand rounds remotely.”

Elueze said the weekly sessions are also available online for physicians and medical staff to watch anytime and earn continuing medical education credits.

“I believe so much in education because the only way to improve your practice is to learn. There is a saying, ‘When you teach, you learn twice.’ I see an opportunity to teach all our physicians to make us better, so we can provide excellent care.”

Elueze said he was impressed when he toured the Pittsburg campus.

“It is a very beautiful campus, and the staff are very receptive; you feel at home, and I am happy to report that the program has felt very much at home in that campus,” he said.