incremental recovery

There is not a tremendous amount of "new" news since my last post. Incremental recovery efforts continue.

The FM residents are dispersed across the state and Linda and I are working on plans for block 5 now. We hope to have a little more than half to maybe 2/3 of the residents back to the Houston/Galveston area by the beginning of block 5. We are fortunate in that we've worked with a number of mainland community hospitals for certain core rotations for several years and they are up and running already and taking on additional residents beyond the usual numbers.

It looks like FM will be able to open one of our clinic sites in the next week or so and I hope to put some residents there for the outpatient FM core rotation in block 5.

This morning I read a news article stating that 75% of the island's housing is uninhabitable so I'm concerned that even once we're able to return, many of our patients simply will not be there. The ABFM is being flexible with us regarding continuity clinic requirements, but we will need to aggressively work towards recovery of our FMC even so. Dr. Thompson and others have this high on their priority list.

We're beginning to work on housing options for our residents whose housing is uninhabitable. This will be a significant challenge, given the widespread destruction of housing and very limited availability for the foreseeable future. We are exploring several different avenues as solutions.

No definite decisions regarding recruiting and the 2009 Match have yet been made. We WILL interview and recruit a class, although I'm not sure what size that class will be. I definitely plan to interview and recruit for our 2 PGY1 AOA positions and some ACGME positions as well, number to be determined. In all likelihood, we will not begin interviews until late October or early November. Stay tuned for further updates!