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Drs Robert Glatter, Alainya Tomanec, and JD Cambron discuss the community effort taken to avert the closure of the Christus Spohn emergency medicine residency program.
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TRANSCRIPT
Robert D. Glatter, MD: Hi. I'm Dr Robert Glatter, medical advisor for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Today, we'll be discussing a story that made national headlines in October 2023: the proposed closure of the Christus Spohn emergency medicine residency program affiliated with Texas A&M University that was planned for 2026, and the recent grassroots and administrative actions that were taken to avert this closure.
Joining me today is Dr Alainya V. Tomanec, program director of the emergency medicine residency at Christus Spohn, along with Dr John D. (JD) Cambron, associate program director of emergency medicine residency at Christus Spohn. I want to welcome both of you to our broadcast.
Alainya V. Tomanec, MD: Thanks for having us.
John D. Cambron, DO: Yes. Thank you for having us.
Navigating Challenges Amid the Residency Closure Threat
Glatter: Dr Tomanec, I want to begin with you. Can you set the stage for the main reasons you believe that hospital leadership planned to close the emergency medicine residency in 2026?
Tomanec: The main reason that they gave us when we asked that same question ourselves was that Christus is a very large corporation. They're continually reviewing their funding allocation and determined that the funding allocation was more strategically used for a focus on primary care due to the need for primary care expansion in the community. The resources were limited, and that was the best plan at that time when they were evaluating how to allocate that funding. It was seen that the phase out was the best way to provide reutilization of that funding but also to continue and finish out training of the residents that were already here.
Glatter: This news hit at a very difficult time, obviously, during interview season in early October. JD, I'll let you kind of talk about that a little bit. I'm curious how you rebounded from that.
Cambron: Yes. We had a single interview day, and we were very excited about our number of applicants to that point. The timing was somewhat unfortunate, given we had to halt our current interview season a day or 2 before we were scheduled to have our next interview day. That really, throughout the process, helped us talk to our community leaders about putting the pedal to the metal about why we needed to get this decision reversed acutely and that it couldn't be a slow-drag process because we needed to resume our interview process immediately if we were going to have a chance to successfully match our upcoming class.
I have to thank and really applaud our community supporters and leaders for recognizing how significant that was and accelerating this timeline of reversal because we have jumped right back into interview season. I really feel like we did not miss a step. Our residents and our faculty group are unified beyond belief. Because of that, we've had a large amount of participation in our interview days, and we've been interviewing very well I believe. We've had good interview numbers, good applicant numbers, and we're looking forward to March.
Glatter: Dr Tomanec, I'm curious, in terms of the residents themselves, do most of the residents who train at Spohn stay in the area?
Tomanec: In fact, a majority of our faculty are actually previous graduates of this program. I'm a graduate of this program. I graduated in 2014. Many of our residents stay on not only as faculty, but work in the community, work in the region, and then also work in the rural facilities in our hospitals and some with our freestanding emergency rooms (ERs) here in town. It's a little bit hard to track because, you know, in emergency medicine there are many different employment models. Over 50% of our graduates have stayed and worked in the Coastal Bend, so it was very important to us to bring that to light and show the community that we do keep people that we train here, we're serving the community, and we're here for them. That's why we exist.
That was part of the reason why we were able to gather such support from everybody in the political advocacy world, our physician groups around town, and just the community members, too, because they see that we do stay. Many of our local physician leaders and medical directors at most of the hospitals in town and the ERs are graduates of the program. That was important to them as well to keep that here because they want to have doctors to continue to staff their ERs as well.
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