Family and Preventive Medicine welcomes 20 new residents

Georgia Senator Mary Margaret Oliver was an honored speaker at a reception given last week by the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine. The reception was to celebrate the opening of Emory's Family Practice Residency Program and welcome the 20 new family practice residents. Thanks were extended to Georgia family practitioners who have supported family practice at Emory, the State of Georgia's Joint Board of Family Practice and the key legislators who provided guidance and financial assistance in the establishment of Emory's family practice residency program. Providing a residency program to train family practice physicians marks a new era for the medical school, which has been known chiefly for its success in training medical specialists such as heart surgeons or ophthalmologists. The new residency program, headed by Ann Stein, is based

at Crawford Long Hos-pital, where residents receive much of their training and experience, both in the hospital and at Emory Family-Health, a model office located in a nearby professional building. Residents also spend time at Grady, Egleston, The Emory Clinic, and other sites, including at least one month in a rural setting. Some of the new residents are recent graduates, said Stein, and some trained and practiced in other fields of medicine before deciding to pursue primary care and family practice medicine. John Brown, executive director of the Joint Board of Family Practice for Georgia, the organization concerned with the distribution of family physicians across the state, told Department of Family and Preventive Medicine Chair Lawrence Lutz (who had been charged by Emory with developing the new residency program) and others at the reception that "Emory's commitment to primary care, while retaining its commitment to specialists able to deal with the most complex of cases, is a perfect illustration of the growing recognition of the importance of primary care medicine in an age of managed care. We are delighted to see Emory become more involved with meeting the need for family physicians.

--Sylvia Wrobel

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