Under the glass atrium of the hospital’s Wetherbee Lobby, the five residents — recent medical school graduates completing specialized training under the supervision of an attending physician — were eased into embroidered white lab coats and ceremoniously presented with pagers, which immediately started going off.
During the 90-minute ceremony, a crowd from Phoebe and the Albany Area Chamber of Commerce prayed with the Rev. Michael Catt of Sherwood Baptist Church and cheered the five, plus the hospital’s new sports medicine fellow Augusto Soltero, for the contributions they were making to family medicine in rural Georgia.
“The Southwest Georgia Family Medicine Residency Program is the only such program in the state of Georgia to train family medicine physicians to practice in rural Southwest Georgia,” said Lemuel Griffin, chairman of Phoebe Putney Health System.
Five new residents are added each year to the three-year program, and 60-75 percent of program graduates remain as practicing physicians within a 75-mile radius of Albany, said Nick Kilmer, interim director of the residency program.
Second- and third-year residents waved from the balcony to the new class.
Hospital CEO Joel Wernick introduced two Southwest Georgia legislators who spoke at the ceremony, “folks that were very much involved in the visioning” for health care in the region — Sen. Michael Meyer von Bremen, D-Albany, and Rep. Richard Royal, R-Camilla.
A need recognized during the 1980s for more physicians in rural Georgia led to the creation of the family medicine residency in 1993, with Phoebe selected as “an ideal site” for the program, said Meyer von Bremen, who is running for a seat on the Georgia Court of Appeals.
A child who had died en route from Fort Gaines to a Eufaula, Ala., hospital six years before showed the gravity of the need, he remembered.
“A child drowned and died because they could not get the child to the hospital in time,” Meyer von Bremen said. “A primary health care program that reaches out within a few minutes of an incident like this can pull somebody around.”
Royal said growth in metro Atlanta would soon further dilute legislative representation from the region at the Capitol, where “a lot of them don’t understand our culture; they don’t understand the rural areas.”
Since the 1980s, programs such as the “Country Doctor Scholarship” have provided financial incentives for physicians to practice in counties with less than 30,000 people, said the legislator, who is not running for re-election this fall after 25 years in the House.
“We need to do more to encourage especially family physicians to go to rural areas,” Royal said.
When the ceremony ended and refreshments were served, new resident Katherine A. Hemby marveled at the treatment.
“It’s really nice that they go to this much trouble to welcome us,” Hemby said. “Most programs don’t. My friends, they were thrown their white coats, and told, ‘Here, get a patch put on somewhere.’ It’s just night and day. It’s wonderful to feel welcomed.”
A graduate of Converse College and Saba University Medical School in the Netherlands Antilles, Hemby said the program’s Albany location was close enough to family members in Eufaula, Mississippi and Atlanta.
“This is a good location to be around the family, and it’s a good community,” she said.
Three of the program’s residents attended medical school in the Netherlands Antilles, Dutch islands in the Caribbean, including Hemby, Steven Yamazaki and Gary Swartzentruber.
Swartzentruber said he was thrilled to bring his family to Albany after a medical internship in Brooklyn, N.Y., noting he has family in Montezuma.
“I’m a country boy,” he said. “A rural area is where I would see myself practicing.”
The program’s other residents introduced Thursday were Richard Hawthorne, who attended medical school at Kansas City University, and Daniel Obi-Ofodile, a native of Nigeria who attended the University of Nigeria in Enugu.
Second-year resident Latifat Agbeja wished the new residents well and said she had enjoyed her experience in Albany so far.
“It’s doable,” said Adbeja, a native of Nigeria who attended the Medical College of Georgia. “It could be worse. I like the people, I like that it’s a small town. The people are so friendly.”