faculty RIF

Today has been very painful as we've said goodbye to more of our colleagues and friends.

The impact to the Dept. of FM of the faculty RIF is as follows:

Two faculty who had been recruited or were in the process of being recruited for December and January start dates will not be hired.

Dr. Weaver, Dr. Irwin and Dr. King will be leaving us. Although not official, I heard that Dr. Weaver may be staying on in some volunteer capacity with her POM groups. Dr. King has volunteered to continue to do some attending with the residents. As I hear anything official related to those two items, I will post here.

Also, my friend and right hand man (Assistant Program Director) Ron Williams will have his time reduced to 50%. He and I are in the process of figuring out exactly how we can arrange that to work best for all concerned.

Barbara Ferrell's time will also be reduced to 50%.

Many of our faculty are in dual-career families, and some who were able to retain their jobs in FM were still faced with the loss of their spouse's job.

We all, residents and faculty alike, are clearly saddened by these changes brought to us by Ike. Family Medicine was hit hard and rumor is, other departments took even harder hits. I won't go into details here because it would only be rumor at this point. Most likely you will be able to read about it on the local newspaper website before long.

In other news, the hospital opened briefly this morning, only to close again after a few hours due to air quality concerns as I understand it. I believe the next potential opening date is a week from today.

I am typically a silver-lining kind of person, but I'm having a hard time finding it today. I know I will find it and that I'm just feeling sad about today's events. But I'm going to allow myself to feel sad today and leave it at that. Check back later and I'll let you know about that silver lining. Or lemonade from lemons, or however you want to put it...